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StarCraft

2023-06-11T20:40:29Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711:

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[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

The actual story behind this rumor is that Warcraft 1 was originally going to be based on Warhammer Fantasy and Blizzard was in talks with GW in the mid-90s to ask them for the IP, however, the deal simply fell through. The still young Blizzard had just closed development on a Superman game and the treatment by DC greatly soured opinions of the studio regarding the development of licensed titles, as the tough deadlines set by DC and creative limitations lead to a misreable working experience. GW on the other hand felt very iffy about a PC developer approaching them, as gaming in those days was primarily the realm of consoles like the NES or Atari, with PC gaming being a niche only very tech-savvy and dedicated fans dabbled in. Remember, this was before RTS and FPS were even invented with Dune and Wolfenstein 3D, respectively, the big games on PC of that time were simulators like [[Sim City]], RPGs like [[Ultima]], or the adventure games by Sierra and Lucasarts (Add to that that Windows 95, which revolutionized ease-of-use of a PC also hadn't come out yet). Both sides, according to Mike Morhaime, didn't enter the negotionations in good faith and parted ways on amicable terms since both Blizzard and GW just reached the conclusion that the fuzz wasn't worth much in the end. That Starcraft was going to be a 40k game is entirely false, probably with some people mixing up the Warhammers and then wrapping their heads around it as they saw fit.

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units. They can deal lots of damage in larger groups, especially after upgrades, but are very fragile and don't have the best range. Their flexibility and cheapness make them a core component of the Terran early game.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat. In Hellion configuration, they are best used for quick drive-by into your enemies economy, where their flamethrowers will make short work of workers, but their speed also makes them surprisingly viable against groups of light enemies. Hellbats on the other hand are more of a tanking unit; they have decent health and their flamethrower will annihilate light units; they have quite low range however and move fairly slowly.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage. They can serve either as dedicated harrassers sneaking into the backline and oneshotting several of your opponents workers or giving heavy fire support for your army on the move, where their cannons will deal very heavy damage against all enemies.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly. It is best used as an (expensive) stalemate breaker to distract your enemy for your frontline to advance (four Battlecruisers make very quick work of any base if left undisturbed) or as a support unit that can delete single critical units during an encounter (usually targets like Collossi and Ravagers).
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units. Generally speaking, Hydras are the backline of most Zerg armies; they hit hard and have decent range, but can't take a beating. They're also decent counters against flying units that don't specialize in dealing with masses of light units (Think Void Rays and Banshees).

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-bat-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings). Mutalisks are fast and excel at diving into undefended backlines but their dps is low and they struggle against most things that can actually shoot back at them. As such, you usually either see them as harassers or as air support for a flood of Zerglings that keep your enemy distracted.

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts". Was for quite some time one of the most broken units in the game because their Locusts benefitted from Weapon and Armour upgrades, letting them put out a lot of dps at a very reasonable price and against enemy forces that were much more expensive. This went so far that pros abused the shit out of them to the point that one particular match in pro play lasted ''three hours'' because it was so hard to crack them. LotV reworked them to be an entirely defensive unit, as they now move at a snails pace off creep, making it tricky for them to keep up with the fast and hard hitting main Zerg units like Hydralisks and Zerglings.

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II. They like doing long-ranged dive attacks into the enemies backline and economy, but are piss poor as part of your main line due to their slow attack speed and low range.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Dark Templars are by far the most fragile unit of the Protoss roster but can oneshot workers and most early game units. As such, they can also support your main line while remaining cloaked and even after your main force is defeated... until detectors arrive on the scene. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

StarCraft

2023-06-10T19:50:43Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711:

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

The actual story behind this rumor is that Warcraft 1 was originally going to be based on Warhammer Fantasy game and Blizzard was in talks with GW in the mid-90s to ask them for the IP, however, the deal simply fell through. The still young Blizzard had just closed development on a Superman game and the treatment by DC greatly soured opinions of the studio regarding the development of licensed titles, as the tough deadlines set by DC and creative limitations lead to a misreable working experience. GW on the other hand felt very iffy about a PC developer approaching them, as gaming in those days was primarily the realm of consoles like the NES or Atari, with PC gaming being a niche only very tech-savvy and dedicated fans dabbled in. Remember, this was before RTS and FPS were even invented with Dune and Wolfenstein 3D, respectively, the big games on PC of that time were simulators like [[Sim City]], RPGs like [[Ultima]], or the adventure games by Sierra and Lucasarts (Add to that that Windows 95, which revolutionized ease-of-use of a PC also hadn't come out yet). Both sides, according to Mike Morhaime, didn't enter the negotionations in good faith and parted ways on amicable terms since both Blizzard and GW just reached the conclusion that the fuzz wasn't worth much in the end. That Starcraft was going to be a 40k game is entirely false, probably with some people mixing up the Warhammers and then wrapping their heads around it as they saw fit.

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units. They can deal lots of damage in larger groups, especially after upgrades, but are very fragile and don't have the best range. Their flexibility and cheapness make them a core component of the Terran early game.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat. In Hellion configuration, they are best used for quick drive-by into your enemies economy, where their flamethrowers will make short work of workers, but their speed also makes them surprisingly viable against groups of light enemies. Hellbats on the other hand are more of a tanking unit; they have decent health and their flamethrower will annihilate light units; they have quite low range however and move fairly slowly.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage. They can serve either as dedicated harrassers sneaking into the backline and oneshotting several of your opponents workers or giving heavy fire support for your army on the move, where their cannons will deal very heavy damage against all enemies.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly. It is best used as an (expensive) stalemate breaker to distract your enemy for your frontline to advance (four Battlecruisers make very quick work of any base if left undisturbed) or as a support unit that can delete single critical units during an encounter (usually targets like Collossi and Ravagers).
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units. Generally speaking, Hydras are the backline of most Zerg armies; they hit hard and have decent range, but can't take a beating. They're also decent counters against flying units that don't specialize in dealing with masses of light units (Think Void Rays and Banshees).

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-bat-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings). Mutalisks are fast and excel at diving into undefended backlines but their dps is low and they struggle against most things that can actually shoot back at them. As such, you usually either see them as harassers or as air support for a flood of Zerglings that keep your enemy distracted.

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts". Was for quite some time one of the most broken units in the game because their Locusts benefitted from Weapon and Armour upgrades, letting them put out a lot of dps at a very reasonable price and against enemy forces that were much more expensive. This went so far that pros abused the shit out of them to the point that one particular match in pro play lasted ''three hours'' because it was so hard to crack them. LotV reworked them to be an entirely defensive unit, as they now move at a snails pace off creep, making it tricky for them to keep up with the fast and hard hitting main Zerg units like Hydralisks and Zerglings.

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II. They like doing long-ranged dive attacks into the enemies backline and economy, but are piss poor as part of your main line due to their slow attack speed and low range.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Dark Templars are by far the most fragile unit of the Protoss roster but can oneshot workers and most early game units. As such, they can also support your main line while remaining cloaked and even after your main force is defeated... until detectors arrive on the scene. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

StarCraft

2023-06-08T02:59:03Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Protoss Units */

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units. They can deal lots of damage in larger groups, especially after upgrades, but are very fragile and don't have the best range. Their flexibility and cheapness make them a core component of the Terran early game.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat. In Hellion configuration, they are best used for quick drive-by into your enemies economy, where their flamethrowers will make short work of workers, but their speed also makes them surprisingly viable against groups of light enemies. Hellbats on the other hand are more of a tanking unit; they have decent health and their flamethrower will annihilate light units; they have quite low range however and move fairly slowly.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage. They can serve either as dedicated harrassers sneaking into the backline and oneshotting several of your opponents workers or giving heavy fire support for your army on the move, where their cannons will deal very heavy damage against all enemies.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly. It is best used as an (expensive) stalemate breaker to distract your enemy for your frontline to advance (four Battlecruisers make very quick work of any base if left undisturbed) or as a support unit that can delete single critical units during an encounter (usually targets like Collossi and Ravagers).
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units. Generally speaking, Hydras are the backline of most Zerg armies; they hit hard and have decent range, but can't take a beating. They're also decent counters against flying units that don't specialize in dealing with masses of light units (Think Void Rays and Banshees).

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-bat-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings). Mutalisks are fast and excel at diving into undefended backlines but their dps is low and they struggle against most things that can actually shoot back at them. As such, you usually either see them as harassers or as air support for a flood of Zerglings that keep your enemy distracted.

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts". Was for quite some time one of the most broken units in the game because their Locusts benefitted from Weapon and Armour upgrades, letting them put out a lot of dps at a very reasonable price and against enemy forces that were much more expensive. This went so far that pros abused the shit out of them to the point that one particular match in pro play lasted ''three hours'' because it was so hard to crack them. LotV reworked them to be an entirely defensive unit, as they now move at a snails pace off creep, making it tricky for them to keep up with the fast and hard hitting main Zerg units like Hydralisks and Zerglings.

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II. They like doing long-ranged dive attacks into the enemies backline and economy, but are piss poor as part of your main line due to their slow attack speed and low range.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Dark Templars are by far the most fragile unit of the Protoss roster but can oneshot workers and most early game units. As such, they can also support your main line while remaining cloaked and even after your main force is defeated... until detectors arrive on the scene. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

StarCraft

2023-06-08T02:56:39Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Protoss Units */

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units. They can deal lots of damage in larger groups, especially after upgrades, but are very fragile and don't have the best range. Their flexibility and cheapness make them a core component of the Terran early game.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat. In Hellion configuration, they are best used for quick drive-by into your enemies economy, where their flamethrowers will make short work of workers, but their speed also makes them surprisingly viable against groups of light enemies. Hellbats on the other hand are more of a tanking unit; they have decent health and their flamethrower will annihilate light units; they have quite low range however and move fairly slowly.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage. They can serve either as dedicated harrassers sneaking into the backline and oneshotting several of your opponents workers or giving heavy fire support for your army on the move, where their cannons will deal very heavy damage against all enemies.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly. It is best used as an (expensive) stalemate breaker to distract your enemy for your frontline to advance (four Battlecruisers make very quick work of any base if left undisturbed) or as a support unit that can delete single critical units during an encounter (usually targets like Collossi and Ravagers).
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units. Generally speaking, Hydras are the backline of most Zerg armies; they hit hard and have decent range, but can't take a beating. They're also decent counters against flying units that don't specialize in dealing with masses of light units (Think Void Rays and Banshees).

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-bat-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings). Mutalisks are fast and excel at diving into undefended backlines but their dps is low and they struggle against most things that can actually shoot back at them. As such, you usually either see them as harassers or as air support for a flood of Zerglings that keep your enemy distracted.

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts". Was for quite some time one of the most broken units in the game because their Locusts benefitted from Weapon and Armour upgrades, letting them put out a lot of dps at a very reasonable price and against enemy forces that were much more expensive. This went so far that pros abused the shit out of them to the point that one particular match in pro play lasted ''three hours'' because it was so hard to crack them. LotV reworked them to be an entirely defensive unit, as they now move at a snails pace off creep, making it tricky for them to keep up with the fast and hard hitting main Zerg units like Hydralisks and Zerglings.

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II. They like doing long-ranged dive attacks into the enemies backline and economy, but are piss poor as part of your main line due to their slow attack speed and low range.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

StarCraft

2023-06-08T02:52:24Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Zerg Units */

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units. They can deal lots of damage in larger groups, especially after upgrades, but are very fragile and don't have the best range. Their flexibility and cheapness make them a core component of the Terran early game.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat. In Hellion configuration, they are best used for quick drive-by into your enemies economy, where their flamethrowers will make short work of workers, but their speed also makes them surprisingly viable against groups of light enemies. Hellbats on the other hand are more of a tanking unit; they have decent health and their flamethrower will annihilate light units; they have quite low range however and move fairly slowly.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage. They can serve either as dedicated harrassers sneaking into the backline and oneshotting several of your opponents workers or giving heavy fire support for your army on the move, where their cannons will deal very heavy damage against all enemies.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly. It is best used as an (expensive) stalemate breaker to distract your enemy for your frontline to advance (four Battlecruisers make very quick work of any base if left undisturbed) or as a support unit that can delete single critical units during an encounter (usually targets like Collossi and Ravagers).
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units. Generally speaking, Hydras are the backline of most Zerg armies; they hit hard and have decent range, but can't take a beating. They're also decent counters against flying units that don't specialize in dealing with masses of light units (Think Void Rays and Banshees).

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-bat-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings). Mutalisks are fast and excel at diving into undefended backlines but their dps is low and they struggle against most things that can actually shoot back at them. As such, you usually either see them as harassers or as air support for a flood of Zerglings that keep your enemy distracted.

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts". Was for quite some time one of the most broken units in the game because their Locusts benefitted from Weapon and Armour upgrades, letting them put out a lot of dps at a very reasonable price and against enemy forces that were much more expensive. This went so far that pros abused the shit out of them to the point that one particular match in pro play lasted ''three hours'' because it was so hard to crack them. LotV reworked them to be an entirely defensive unit, as they now move at a snails pace off creep, making it tricky for them to keep up with the fast and hard hitting main Zerg units like Hydralisks and Zerglings.

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

StarCraft

2023-06-08T02:31:45Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Terran Units */

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units. They can deal lots of damage in larger groups, especially after upgrades, but are very fragile and don't have the best range. Their flexibility and cheapness make them a core component of the Terran early game.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat. In Hellion configuration, they are best used for quick drive-by into your enemies economy, where their flamethrowers will make short work of workers, but their speed also makes them surprisingly viable against groups of light enemies. Hellbats on the other hand are more of a tanking unit; they have decent health and their flamethrower will annihilate light units; they have quite low range however and move fairly slowly.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage. They can serve either as dedicated harrassers sneaking into the backline and oneshotting several of your opponents workers or giving heavy fire support for your army on the move, where their cannons will deal very heavy damage against all enemies.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly. It is best used as an (expensive) stalemate breaker to distract your enemy for your frontline to advance (four Battlecruisers make very quick work of any base if left undisturbed) or as a support unit that can delete single critical units during an encounter (usually targets like Collossi and Ravagers).
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units.

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings).

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts".

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

StarCraft

2023-06-08T02:25:03Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Terran Units */

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly. It is best used as an (expensive) stalemate breaker to distract your enemy for your frontline to advance (four Battlecruisers make very quick work of any base if left undisturbed) or as a support unit that can delete single critical units during an encounter (usually targets like Collossi and Ravagers).
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units.

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings).

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts".

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

StarCraft

2023-06-08T02:18:48Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Terran Gameplay */

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less than 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

Starcraft 2 made the Terrans more of a glass cannon faction with a strong emphasis on combined arms, much more so than the other two factions. Most of their mechanized units have alternate modes for fitting different roles in your army. The stuff you have is mostly fragile, but punches far above its weight if used correctly. As such, Terrans tend to center around a frontline that they keep their enemies boxed in (in opposition to the Zerg storm of Acid/Spikes/Claws/Teeth and the protoss deathball) and defend that frontline while harassing the enemy backline and slowly advancing.

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. Hey, is it just me or do the [[Moritat]] sound a lot like them? They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant (but not immune) to small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly.
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription. The sigil of the Dominion and the Sons of Korhal before that resembles an arm holding a whip, which became a bit more abstract in Starcraft 2.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Creep:'''This counts, although it isn't exactly a unit. Creep is a purple slime that Zerg organisms subsist from, being put out by most of their structures as well as decicated organisms, called Creep Tumors. In-game, it's the Zergs version of the Protoss power field. Zerg units that walk on it move and regenerate their health faster. Sprading Creep is also a crucial element of a Zerg Players macro; Creep Tumors provide vision to the player and Protoss and Terran buildings cannot be placed on Creep. Creep is also a neutral force in Zerg vs Zerg matchups, often summarized by the motto "Creep is Creep", meaning that Creep will give its benefits to any Zerg player, not just the player who originally placed it down.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units.

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings).

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts".

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the start of Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors (since they did so little damage, they were only worth it if you massed them up, which is a precarious strategy for such an expensive units that gets countered by units that cost less than half), to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Kerrigan into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur. Proper bro-tier Zealot champion concerned with little else but fighting honorably and having a proper brawl to participate in. He is mortally wounded in the invasion of Aiur and comes back as a Dragoon in brood War, where he meets his final end when Kerrigan betrays him.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

The World Wars

2023-06-06T03:18:52Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Additional Factors */

{{Grimdark}}
[[File:MAC52_SIDEBAR_TANKS01-810x445.jpg|thumb|right|War has changed...]]
{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}

Unless you've been living under a rock in Antarctica for the past 80-odd years, there is a chance you've heard of the World Wars. They were some of the most devastating conflicts ever waged by mankind. Even today there are still noticeable economic, demographic, and ecological effects from the raw amount of destruction wrought during both wars. For all intents and purposes, the World Wars are the closest we have ever gotten to [[Warhammer 40,000]].

A brief introduction is difficult to write, but for World War I, M.A.I.N.(Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism) largely sums it up. When most people think of WWI, they envision trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, and massive artillery barrages. Meanwhile, World War II can be summarized as some [[pol|dickhead using conspiracy theories about Jews]] and geopolitics to start a war that rapidly boiled into a massive clusterfuck. When people think WWII, they typically think of Nazis, D-Day, America, the Holocaust, and maybe the Battle of Britain/Pearl Harbor/Stalingrad, depending on where they're from.

The World Wars have served as inspiration for hundreds of games, uncounted thousands of novels and comics, hundreds of movies, [[Warhammer 40,000|dozens]] [[Lord of the Rings|of]] [[Star Wars|franchises]], and overall have left a lasting impact on most of the globe, with the only minor caveat being South America. If you were to go anywhere in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, the Middle East, North Africa, China, or Russia and ask people to share stories of their relatives from either conflict, there is a good chance that someone will have a story for you to hear.

The World Wars resulted in the end of unmatched European global dominance, the collapse of the great imperial powers, and the rise of the United States and Soviet Union until the latter's collapse in 1991. The world we currently lived in has been made entirely possible by the tragedy that was the two World Wars.

==Prelude==
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century kicked off with the Napoleonic Wars when industrialization was building up steam in England, and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers<sup>1,</sup><sup>2</sup>. The American Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era and saw about 600,000-750,000 people dead but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and the issue of Slavery had been resolved. The Franco-Prussian War was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling preview of things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Many Europeans figured that in this new civilized age big wars were a thing of the past, that if war happened it would be resolved quickly with one side throwing in the towel and cutting their losses when things turned south. In the Spring of 1914 few in Europe realized that they were sitting on not only a political powder keg but also a barrel of napalm.

There are two important factors to consider in the buildup to the World Wars: ''Technology'' and ''Nationalism''. Technology is the easier of the two to understand. In the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 yards, was supported by muzzle-loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1 km, and was supplied by ox carts. Meanwhile, steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. By 1914, the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by breech-loading guns that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air, raining a spray of shrapnel over a wide area, machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute, and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, submachine guns, and chemical weapons had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were less than useless on this new kind of battlefield, and the book needed to be re-written from page one.

Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an industrialized nation could turn more of its population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do. As a specific example, Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of its population even at the peak of its power, whereas Germany mobilized nearly 20% of its population during the Great War. This period of peace had consequences in that no one had any good idea how to wage war with or against these newfangled contraptions besides [[Imperial Guard|sending in the next wave]]. People were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London whose dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich whose mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their family, job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with on a daily basis). If a civil war happened and a new noble house ended up in charge while they and their family and friends got through unharmed, they weren't going to care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties and wasn't a huge dick. There was a king somewhere and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all well and good, but politics was generally an abstract that had little to do with their everyday lives.

This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and escalated throughout the Age of Enlightenment as mass propaganda started to become a thing, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their weird languages and customs. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to instill these ideals into everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations with nationalistic populations and governments and other influential groups fond of egging nationalistic sentiment on, it doesn't take much to get them at each other's throats and keep them there.

Intertwined with nationalism is the issue of "Balance of Power"; since the end of the Thirty Years War, the various European powers had been very conscious about preventing any one nation from becoming too powerful and exerting their authority over everyone else. None of them wanted to fight a massive war that would screw everyone else over, and for the most part this rule was followed by everyone except Napoleon, who had great ambitions for France and is mostly vilified for that reason, among others.

This was one of the motivating factors behind such actions as the race to colonize Africa, the "Great Game" between Russia & Britain over India, the War of Spanish Succession where Britain and the Holy Roman Empire fought to prevent the union of France & Spain, or the clusterfuck that was the Crimean War, where a dispute over churches in the Ottoman Empire led to Britain and France declaring war on Russia, only for neither side to gain anything and lose a lot of men and respect. Napoleon had gotten damn near close to completely dominating Europe, but the alliance system played a major role in ensuring no one would get too sabre-rattly... up until Germany unified and changed the whole playing field, leaving politicians desperate and uncertain as to how far Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to go to prove Germany's prestige as a rising power. The result was an arms race that turned into a giant powder keg, which would inevitably explode with the right spark.

Either way, the full implications of all these changes were not really appreciated until it was too late. It's not that people completely had their heads up their asses, mind you. The officers of 1900-14 had taken note of developments in the Boer War and the conflicts in China. Otto von Bismarck was smart enough to see that Europe was a powder keg, and the dreadnought arms race was a clear sign of things being unsettled. Some ideas such as armoured combat land vehicles had been speculated on by the likes of [[H.G. Wells]], and there was some experimentation with armoured cars and things that might evolve into tanks during the first years of the 20th century. Even so, the scope of the shift was underappreciated, especially since there were still plenty of conservative voices in prominent places (both in the military and government) who'd downplay or ignore new technological developments and until things were tested they'd often be seen as voices of moderation against radicals and doomsayers with zero practical experience. Their disillusionment would be complete, bloody, and brutal.

*<small><sup>1</sup>The Taiping Rebellion (not to be confused with the Boxer Rebellion) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.</small>
*<small><sup>2</sup>There was also The War of The Triple Alliance (1865-70), in which Paraguay under López decided to Fight half of South America all at once and ended up getting 9 in 10 Paraguan men killed as well as a decent chunk of the women and kids after López tried to use them as soldiers, which kinda spooked Uruguay and Venezuela but Brazil didn't give a rat's ass and just kept shooting. Again it was fairly localized and South America was fairly underdeveloped, though the simple bloody mindedness of the war was an ominous foreboding of what was to come.</small>

==The First World War==
[[File:Trench warfare great war.jpg|thumb|right|Over the top, lads (sorry, no joke on this one)]]
{{topquote|The War That Will End War.|[[H. G. Wells]], 1914 (spoiler alert, [[fail|it was not]])}}

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it. The abbreviation M.A.I.N is used to refer to the big four reasons it started: Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism.

===Militarism===
Militarism on its own resulted partially from the romanticizing of knights and chivalry, and the idea that serving in the military to conquer colonies for the homeland served to make the state better as a whole. And of course the best way to conquer stuff and then to protect the stuff you'd conquered was to have better weapons and soldiers than the other guys. While most major nations participated in the rise of militarization to some degree, Germany was the keystone of the movement, as its progenitor Prussia was oftentimes called "an army with its own state". This had some factual basis, given that Prussia was born from the Teutonic Crusader State, and its military aristocracy continued to define German policy and culture well into the 20th century.

The veritable arms race in the late 1800s was meant to force peace, resulting in the development of semiautomatic pistols, advanced artillery, increasingly advanced warships, automatic firearms, and a slew of military technological innovations designed to increase the killing power of an individual soldier or unit. Most wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were colonial conflicts waged against low-tech indigenous populations or countries with shitty militaries (the Anglo-Zulu War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War) and as a result were laughably one-sided. This resulted in a general myth that war was an adventure where you got to go kill a bunch of dumb people who needed to understand that your country was better than theirs. It hadn't occurred to the top brass, or anyone else, that if the other guy has the same weapons you do, it isn't nearly as fun; this in spite of warnings from colonial veterans that such a slaughter is inevitable, especially under the old Napoleonic tactics that Europe was still using.

One thing that we'll discuss later is the dreadnought battleship, which radically altered the idea of naval warfare and made everything before them obsolete. A nation's prestige was tied to how many battleships it had, so literally everyone and their dog who could afford one was trying to get their hands on them.

===Alliances===
To prevent one country from getting too much power and hopefully prevent war through mutually assured destruction, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which ultimately coalesced into two pacts: the Triple Entente (France, Britain (kind of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria), with the United States being free to do whatever the fuck it wanted in the Americas and eastern Pacific sans Canada. The Ottoman Empire was desperately trying to stave off its imminent and inevitable collapse, and the chaos in the Balkans would eventually lead them to try and join the Central Powers.

Japan was a special case. It had an alliance with Britain to act as a sort of "check" against the Russians and their Pacific ambitions, while also serving as an valuable ally against the German Pacific colonies. The benefit was also that Russia could act as an ally against the Japanese if they ever started looking towards Australia without Parliament's permission.

Serbia's national sovereignty was guaranteed by France and Russia, and Belgium received a guarantee from Britain that they'd intervene if Germany tried to use them to just waltz into France and thereby threaten Britain. Meanwhile Italy was in theory allied to the Germans and Austrian-Hungarians, but had stuff in Austria-Hungary that they wouldn't [[Blood Ravens|feel too bad about stealing]]. [[Tzeentch|If this all sounds very convoluted, welcome to the late 1800s.]]

===Imperialism===
One of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire, or Imperialism. During the 18th and 19th centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. This all kicked off back when Spain discovered the New World and became very wealthy as a result; as stated on the [[Renaissance]] page, the other nations of Europe ''realllly'' didn't want to live under the Hapsburgs' hegemony and started competing to build their own empires. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France in order to fuel their industry and economy back home at the expense of the natives. The treatment of the indigenous population varied based on whichever European power happened to dominate a particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off; one could argue that at least that stopped the chattel slavery that was endemic to the region until the colonization, but suffice to say the natives would likely think that the chattel slavery was preferable. For a while, the competition was "merely" a case of rivalry, as each nation generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly, barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire, until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck.

The unification of Germany triggered a renewed colonial rush across the globe. Germany, having come late to the game, was determined to play catch-up, even though all of the really desirable territory in Africa and Asia was already claimed. Nevertheless, they still managed to take possession of a bunch of African territories in modern day Namibia and gained a number of island colonies in the Pacific. This ultimately led to everyone starting to side-eye each others' colonies for various reasons. Italy, for example, aspired to be master of the Mediterranean Sea, while Britain had a historical and economic/political reputation to uphold as protector of the waves with their navy, the so-called "Pax Britannica". Remember that, it'll be important.

Meanwhile Austria-Hungary wanted Balkan territories, and Germany and Japan were latecomers who wanted in on the pie. Even the Americans dipped their hand into it by taking Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. Needless to say there were plenty of instances where each empire had a vested interest in stealing territory away from each other for their own political and economic gains.

===Nationalism===
Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who looked at Britain with barely restrained jealousy and decided that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog of Europe. Enter the idea of Nationalism, a political theory that roughly states that loyalty to the state trumps all other loyalties, and that there is no higher expression of loyalty to the state than making it better than all the other states. Combine this with borderline unrestrained capitalism and social Darwinism, and you have a toxic brew of ideas: that your country "must" be better than other countries, cooperation is purely for the benefit of countering rivals and earning prestige, and diplomacy, global politics, and economics are zero-sum games that you have to win. Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism. Patriotism is a love for one's country, while nationalism is a determination to make one's country better than others even at the expense of those other countries.

Remember how we mentioned that Pax Britannica and the technological innovations will come up again later? These two, combined with nationalism, were a special point of concern for Britain. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had become the enforcer of the peace on the world's seas and the guarantor of Britain's world-spanning empire. The United Kingdom invested colossal amounts of time and money into building a world-beating fleet, equipped with the latest naval technology and manned by a highly trained pool of professional officers and sailors. They produced one of the world's first ironclad warships in 1860 and pioneered the use of propeller-driven ships, gun turrets, and torpedoes. By 1889, Britain's determination to hold onto their top-dog status at sea was formally codified as the "two power standard", whereby the Royal Navy was always to be as strong as the number two and three navies in the world. This worked just fine until 1906, when the revolutionary new battleship HMS ''Dreadnought'' was built and launched. With a uniform armament of big guns, turbine engines, and many other technological improvements, ''Dreadnought'' instantly rendered all other battleships in the world obsolete and triggered a worldwide naval arms race as other countries started building their own dreadnoughts.

In this time before the rise of aircraft carriers and submarines, battleships were still the final arbiter of naval power and a potent symbol of national prestige. Any navy that wanted to be taken seriously had to have battleships, but ''Dreadnought'' had set everyone back to square one, including the Royal Navy. Now it was possible for countries that had lacked a battleship navy to catch up with the big players, and it didn't take long for everyone on the planet to get in on the game. Aside from the usual suspects like Britain, Germany, America, Russia, and France, countries like Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were all ordering up dreadnoughts as fast as they could find the money. Wilhelm II was particularly obsessed with having a dreadnought fleet of his own; aside from the boost it would bring to Germany's prestige and military power, he had long been in love with the Royal Navy and dreamed of building a fleet just like it when he became Kaiser. He hadn't even intended to start an arms race, but when Britain saw Germany investing in a fleet that was potentially equal to theirs, they were completely unwilling to risk losing their status as the dominant naval power. Germany wasn't willing to acquiesce either, since they didn't understand why Britain was getting so upset about the whole thing until one British commentator summed up the UK's position as follows: Germany would still be the most powerful country on the continent of Europe with or without a navy, but if the Royal Navy were wiped out, Britain would instantly lose control of its empire and its position as number one superpower in the world.

A further thing to note is that nationalist tensions were starting to weaken the imperial system, as people living in countries that had been subjugated by the great empires started looking around and going "hey, fuck being ruled by a bunch of smelly dickhead foreigners!" While some countries were able to survive these tensions with more or less sensible governments, like England with the House of Commons, more often than not this resulted in outright revolt, which caused the creation of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and a swath of states formerly under the control of an empire that figured they'd be better off ruling themselves. Others were crushed under the Russians, who knew that successful nationalist movements could cause them to face similar issues with Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

The countries that were hardest hit by these successive waves of unrest revolution were none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were creaky, poor, exhausted states in dire need of reform. The solution that was attempted in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep the state from collapsing. The formation of the Dual [[Monarchy]] and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans had the failed Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks coup following the Tanzimat's abolition establishing what was intended to be a constitutional monarch but was really a military dictatorship under the delusionally idealistic and, as would be proven in a few years, seriously incompetent Enver Pasha and his fellows in high command. Others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror and oppression tactics. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the fractious and ethnically diverse Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

===Additional Factors===
Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm was first ''and'' second cousins with Tsar Nicholas of Russia and first cousins with the Tsarina, the King of England, and the queens of Norway, Spain, and Romania, and they all got along about as well as your average pack of siblings.

Another was that when the war started, a [[That Guy|certain someone]] called the United States took a [[A Game of Pretend |totally neutral and not blatantly pro-Entente]] stance by shipping vast amounts of food and materiel to Britain and funding the war via loans to the Entente powers. The massive debt that Britain and France rang up made Wall Street and Washington more and more interested in making sure their investment could be paid back. This along other things would be one of the deciding factors in American involvement in the First World War.

The Franco-Prussian War was also a sore spot for France, who were not only afraid of German encroachment, but determined to get revenge for what they had done to them. This not only contributed to France's bloody-minded determination not to quit fighting, but also influenced the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

As far as significant developments, probably one of the biggest was Wilhelm II sacking Otto von Bismarck for a yes-man. Unlike Wilhelm, Bismarck was smart enough to understand that Germany's rise was a substantial shake-up of the existing European order, and had spent years doing his best to establish Germany's strength and prestige without causing alarm to the other powers. The first Kaiser, Wilhelm I. understood this, as did his son Friedrich III. (who died 90 days into office from cancer), but Wilhelm II wanted to prove his country was better (or more to the point, he wanted to prove that ''he'' was better, as he had longstanding insecurity due to a birth defect in his left arm - a big drawback in an overtly militarized society where physical prowess was the gold standard of manliness). So he sacked probably the smartest man in the entire goddamn government because he wasn't retarded enough to create a [[Horus Heresy|massive war that would fuck everyone over.]] Although there is a point to be made that Bismarck isolated himself in interior politics, as much of his efforts to keep the country stable consisted of suppressing the quickly growing movement of Socialists and alienating the otherwise staunchly conservative Catholics and in both efforts, he failed miserably (The culture war against the Catholics drew the ire of the Pope and the repressions against the workers movement and the Social Democratic Party SPD saw their share of votes increase to the point that they became the largest political party in the Empire by 1913)

===The Straw that Broke Europe's Back===
The spark that detonated the Balkans came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Young Bosnia movement, which was itself under the influence of the Black Hand, an infamous Serbian nationalist organization. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (then the biggest independent Slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When [[Just as Planned|the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli]] and declared war on Serbia. This was the first in a line of dominoes. In response, [[Not as planned|Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany]]. Germany would then invade neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict... at least on paper. In reality, after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France, England had acquired a near-monopoly on overseas trade and undisputed control of the seas, and it would have been perfectly content to let the continental powers beat the shit out of each other without getting involved...until Germany started churning out dreadnoughts of its own. As mentioned, the dreadnought arms race meant that Germany was threatening England's complete naval domination and thus the lifeblood of its empire. A frightened and suspicious Britain was champing at the bit for a throwdown, and Belgium was just the perfect excuse to get involved.

The internationalization of the conflict and the various ethnicities that the colonial empires of Europe press-ganged into service had some downright comical results, like an Indian battalion fighting in East Africa against German-led Askari tribesmen and Maori soldiers killing Turks at Gallipoli, all because because a Serbian shot an Austrian in Bosnia.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, the outbreak of diseases such as the Spanish flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. An entire generation of Europe's young men was destroyed as a result (commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

===Hell on Earth===
{{topquote|European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches.|Virginia Postrel}}

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority/superior fighting spirit, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilian population, at least for a while, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. As the war ground on, morale became so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of mass destruction. Tanks made their debut in this war, slowly rumbling through no-man's-land like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing out punishing amounts of firepower themselves, only to break down in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. Airplanes first saw use in a combat role here, and they would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow influence the negotiations in their countries' favor. The fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM, where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

===Campaigns===
====Western Europe====
{{topquote|What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?<br>— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.<br>Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle<br>Can patter out their hasty orisons.<br>No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;<br>Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—<br>The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells<br>And bugles calling for them from sad shires.|Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"}}

Of all the fronts in WWI, Western Europe is the one that's been most documented and seared into the popular consciousness. It cut through Belgium and France all the way down to Switzerland. When Italy joined the Allies, the front was extended to across the Italo-Austrian border. Germany's Schlieffen Plan was intended to be used to quickly deal with France, and once France was broken troops could be diverted to support the Eastern Front. This didn't come to pass as diplomatic pressure caused troops to be diverted East, preventing their use in the Schlieffen Plan and resulting in the offensive against France stalling out short of its goal of capturing Paris. As neither side had a real advantage over the other, they were forced to dig in for the long haul, creating the conditions for trench warfare, the ugliest and most iconic aspect of WWI. This is where all the stereotypical images of the war originated: endless lines of trenches, forests and fields reduced to blasted, muddy moonscapes, barbed wire and rotting corpses everywhere, clouds of mustard gas, and soldiers armed with bolt-action rifles and bayonets charging into no-man's-land to be slaughtered in the thousands by machine guns and artillery.

The front lines would effectively remain static throughout the war, though both sides made attempts to break the stalemate and resume a true offensive. The Entente attempted breakthroughs at the Battles of the Somme and Ypres, both of which ended in massive casualties for minimal gains. The British army suffered over 57,000 killed, wounded, and missing on the first day of the Somme, which is still the worst casualty rate in its history. Ypres was a series of battles fought in the same general area, collectively becoming known as the First through Fifth Battles of Ypres. Second Ypres saw the Germans' first mass deployment of chemical weapons, while Third Ypres, aka Passchendaele, resulted in somewhere between 400,000-800,000 casualties on both sides. Verdun was a 1916 attempt to knock France out of the war by attacking the fortified city of Verdun, a keystone of France's defensive line. The idea was to grind the French army down through sheer attrition; it backfired and wound up costing the Germans almost as many troops as it did the French (~336,000 German vs. ~379,000 French). Meanwhile, the Spring Offensive of 1918 was a last-ditch attempt to win the war after the Russian capitulation and before the Americans could show up in sufficient numbers to turn the tide. Some indicator of how well this was going to go came from Ludendorff himself, who declared that all the German army had to do was punch a hole in the Allied lines and they'd somehow just win from there.

When Italy joined the fight, basically nothing changed except that the Austro-Hungarians now had to defend their western border in addition to their south and east. The only other significant nation to join the Allies in western Europe was Portugal, who were wooed by promises of protection for their colonial empire in Africa in exchange for joining the Entente.

====Eastern Europe====
Eastern Europe receives comparatively little study compared to the Western Front, mainly because records from that time weren't well preserved or were destroyed during the chaos of the Russian Revolution. While just as bloody in some instances, it offered many more opportunities for maneuver warfare than was afforded on the Western Front. An attack by the Russians on East Prussia went terribly, but just as France hoped, it forced the Germans to divert men away from France and the Schlieffen Plan and into the Eastern Front. This slow advance by the Central Powers in the east would only be halted and reversed in 1916 by the Brusilov Offensive, a brutal assault wherein the Russians shoved the Austro-Hungarians back into their homeland.

This was too much at too high a cost, because mass desertions, poor battlefield performance, inadequate food supply and widespread dissatisfaction with the ruling aristocracy along with everything else wrong with the Russian empire saw the country basically collapse. Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate, after which he and his family were eventually murdered by the Bolsheviks, and a provisional government was set up. This government proceeded to try an attack against Austria-Hungary with horrific results, stoking further unrest. This was eventually followed by the November 1917 Russian Revolution that brought in Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks, who would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The peace agreement between Germany and Russia saw the latter have a ton of territory taken from them in March, which eventually led to the formation of the Baltic nations, Poland, and Ukraine, among others. Finland also broke away during the chaos of the revolution, and with much bigger problems on their plate, the Russians kinda just let it happen.

Meanwhile, Serbia would hold out until 1915 against Austria-Hungary, until being overrun after Bulgaria declared for the Central Powers and helped chase the Serbs into Greece. Montenegro followed a few months later in 1916. Greece eventually forced their king to abdicate and declared for the Entente in 1917. The Bulgarians were forced into an armistice after the defeat at Dobro-Pole.

Romania joined the war after seeing the debacle of the Brusilov Offensive, thinking they could join in on the tail-end and steal some land from a couple of dying empires. They were promptly disabused of this notion after they got their shit kicked in by Bulgaria, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, and their army took up a supporting role alongside the Russians until the Bolshevik revolution forced them to sign an armistice. In the end they still managed to increase their territories as a result of their participation in the conflict, so they got what they'd wanted even if it hadn't gone exactly as planned.

====Ottoman Empire====
When the guns of August started blasting, the Ottoman Empire was in the final stages of collapse. A series of military defeats throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had led to the Tanzimat period of the 19th century, which had bought the empire some time thanks to extensive reforms that had taken place, but there was increasing unrest in the Balkans and elsewhere. Though the Turks suppressed several nationalist uprisings, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 forced them to grant independence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, while Austria-Hungary walked in and took Bosnia-Herzegovina and Britain gained ''de facto'' control of Cyprus and Egypt. The empire's last throw of the dice came with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a ''coup d'etat'' that attempted to reform the empire into a democratic state by restoring its constitution and establishing an electoral system. The Italo-Turkish War in 1911 cost the Empire its North African territories and the Dodecanese, while the First Balkan War the following year cost it almost all its territories in the Balkans.

When the war broke out, the Ottomans officially declared neutrality at first, though they talked to both sides to see what they might get out of joining either one. They ultimately came down on the German side after being offered territorial concessions and a guarantee of defense against Russia, along with the Germans essentially forcing the issue by sending a battlecruiser and light cruiser through the Dardanelles strait to Constantinople. Turkey bought the ships and officially commissioned them into their navy, only for the Germans to run off and start bombarding Russia's Black Sea ports without formal authorization from the Turkish government.

Turkey's most well-known contribution to World War I was its defense of the Dardanelles, the strait which allows passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They had closed the strait to all Allied shipping not long after entering the war. This inflicted a crippling blow to Russia's economy, which depended on grain exports from the Crimea and elsewhere on the Black Sea coast. The British made several attempts to capture the strait, which would let them put ships into the Black Sea, threaten Constantinople directly, and reopen Russia's lifeline. Several purely naval efforts to smash the forts and gun positions defending the strait failed, after which Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a landing at the Gallipoli peninsula. A protracted and bloody campaign ensued which saw Australian and New Zealander troops (the famed ANZACs) being fed into the grinder while the Turks more than held their own (no thanks to high command, big thanks to then Colonel Mustafa Kemal). The British ultimately conceded defeat and withdrew their troops, and the Dardanelles remained closed for the rest of the war. The campaign became an emotional flashpoint for Australia and New Zealand, who (not inaccurately) viewed it as a senseless sacrifice of their best young men by their colonial overlords, and was part of the reason they began pushing for greater autonomy and eventually independence after the war. The failure also got Churchill fired from the Admiralty, which most people at the time figured was the end of his career. Perhaps the biggest consequence of this was the shattering of the notion of colonial invincibility, which officially ignited the spark of anti-colonialism across the globe.

Another major front for the Ottomans was the Mesopotamian campaign, which saw them fighting the British in the Middle East. Though the empire did well for the first two years, the Arab Revolt of 1916-1917, led by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Faisal bin Al-Hussein, saw Arabic irregulars waging a guerrilla war against the Ottomans that tied down great numbers of troops and ultimately led to their defeat in the theater. Britain fucked up here as well; to secure Arabic support for the revolt, they had promised to back the creation of a unified Arab state, which they would recognize after the war. They promptly reneged on that deal once the war was over, instead signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France. The agreement haphazardly carved the Middle East into a bunch of mandate territories, all of whom had and still have beef with each other for various reasons. It is still the cause of widespread resentment in the region to this day.

After the war had really gotten rolling, the Ottomans also decided they might as well do some war crimes while they were at it and promptly committed genocides against the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. [[/pol/|Turkey claimed at the time, and still insists today, that the Armenian genocide in particular was not a genocide, that the Armenians were resettled for totally legitimate military reasons, and that the Armenians were actually the ones doing the genociding, so they totally had it coming, etc etc]]. Bringing this up around anyone from Turkey is a ''really'' good way to start a fight; Turkey's founding myths rest on the notion that the genocide never happened, so the modern Turkish government is quick to banhammer any kind of pop culture that even mentions it. The average citizen either doesn't care or if educated sees any and all actions taken as desperate survival measures against colonization (not an unfair concern if one looks at Africa or India). The indisputable Turkish hero of the war and founder of the modern nation state, Mustafa Kemal, fighting at Gallipoli while the whole mess that was Anatolia at the time was taking place while Enver Pasha was in the lap of luxury pretending to be a soldier also makes sure that the modern republic is fiercely held as being wholly separate so even modernists won't agree with Western historians on this matter.

====Africa====
Before the war, most of the colonial powers seemed to agree that if a war ever started, Africa should be left out of it. The risk of breaking the grasp of the metropoli over the colonies was too great, and if the colonial powers kicked each other to the curb in Africa, it could give the natives ideas about declaring independence, especially if they were armed and trained for war. The Conference of Berlin had already stated decades ago that any war between colonial powers would set the colonies aside as neutral parties. Of course, once the war started, all the high-minded rhetoric went down the drain; the Entente saw the German colonies as easy pickings, isolated and surrounded as they were by the much bigger colonial holdings of the British, the French, and the Portuguese. Thus, Germany had lost control over most of its colonies by 1916, since it couldn't really afford to divert resources to the colonies (and the British Navy would have intercepted them anyway). In German East Africa, however, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck decided he wasn't going to let any damned Limeys roll over on him, so he rallied his small force of native askaris and German officers and led a notably successful campaign of guerrilla/mobile warfare against the British colonial troops. They managed to hold out against British, Belgian, and Portuguese armies many times their size (hell, by the time he learned Germany had lost the war, [[awesome|he was invading British territory]]).

As an equally badass postscript, when the German government finally agreed to award the askaris back pay several decades later, most of the survivors had lost their uniforms and certificates of service. To prove that they had served under von Lettow-Vorbeck, each man who came forth was handed a broom and ordered in German to execute the manual of arms. [[Awesome|Every one of them remembered their training]].

====Pacific====
Easily the quietest theater of the war. Mostly just Japan taking over Germany's scattered Pacific colonies. There were a few minor naval engagements between the German Far East Squadron and the Royal Navy and some attacks by German commerce raiders, but overall it was pretty sparse compared to what would happen in the sequel. The biggest consequence was that the Chinese had joined the Allied Powers, hoping to show solidarity with them and get some of their land back from at least one of the imperial powers that had been carving them up like Peking duck for the last century, so they were understandably pissed when Japan was awarded those German territories instead. Japan was also given a bunch of other German island colonies scattered across the western Pacific, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused all three powers to start side-eyeing each other.

===Aftermath===
The consequences of WWI cannot be understated. This four-year-long international bloodletting completely destroyed the Eurocentric world order that had persisted since the 1500s, reduced all European powers except Russia from being superpowers in their own right to second-rank states, and began the end of the age of (overt) imperialism for good. The amount of money spent on this war was enormous; Britain went from the world's biggest lender to its biggest debtor, having spent a treasury accumulated over the course of 300 years of colonial British and English history in just four years. France saw its industrial and agricultural heartlands in the northeast reduced to a shell-pocked, poisonous wasteland that is ''to this day'' unusable and dangerous from all the unexploded ordnance buried in the fields and forests. Germany had gone from its familiar Prussian semi-feudal social order to a constitutional republic with nothing to fill the social void that was left when the old Imperial elites just fucked off elsewhere and left it to the Social Democrats and Liberals to try and clean up the mess they had created. Russia was transformed into the Soviet Union and could only compensate for the extreme loss of people and infrastructure by installing a tyrannical regime and condemning millions of its own people to death in forced labour camps and engineered famines. And that's just in Europe. In the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France haphazardly carved the region up into a bunch of countries and territories with no regard ([[Marines Malevolent|or intentional disregard]]) for the cultural mixup of the lands they took from the Ottomans. This ended up creating some of the most vicious and long-lasting ethnic conflicts in history, most of which are still going on to this day, with the Iraq-Iran, Israeli-Palestinian and in general Sunni-Shi'a conflict and the Turkish-Kurdish war (of which the latter's first uprising was explicitly aided by the British) being particularly noteworthy examples. The latter one in particular is only on the way out more than one hundred and ten years later when military crackdown and drones made terrorism unviable (and Turkish Kurds realizing that living in Turkey as opposed to a nonviable independent state surrounded by hostile powers, or worse, Syria or Iraq, wasn't so bad after all). And of course all of these people ended up nursing a profound grudge against the West that would only get worse when they found themselves relegated to being a mere prize for the Soviets and the Western bloc to compete over during the Cold War. This too would end up coming back to haunt everyone involved nearly a century later. Japan gained a bunch of Pacific territory taken from the Germans, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused them to start thinking more seriously about flexing their own imperialist muscles in the region. Moreover, Japan's vocal dissatisfaction with how they were treated by the rest of the Allies after the war caused a negative feedback loop of hostility and distrust between them and the Western powers, which had direct and dire consequences in the next war.

===The Easter Rising===
Ever since they'd been incorporated into Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, Ireland hadn't been particularly happy under British rule. Things like the abolition of their parliament, the Great Potato Famine, the oppression of Irish Catholics, and the British army's heavy-handed treatment of anyone who got too unruly had caused younger Irish nationalists to conclude that nothing was going to get done unless they did it with violence. Just before the outbreak of the war, Britain had actually passed an act to grant the Irish home rule, but with Europe turning into a mosh pit, the act was suspended for a year, and then for two more periods of six months each as the war dragged on. At this point, several leaders of the nationalist Irish Republican Brotherhood decided that enough was enough and began planning an armed uprising during Easter Week 1916 to break Ireland free from the UK, even reaching out to the Germans for support. The rest of the IRB didn't think it was such a good idea and the Germans refused their initial suggestion to send a landing force, instead offering to send them some weapons and ammunition. The leaders who were planning the revolt didn't tell their foot soldiers in the Irish Volunteers until the last minute what was going on, and when the Royal Navy seized the German arms shipment, one of the less belligerent IRB leaders immediately decided to call the whole thing off. As a result, what was supposed to be a nationwide uprising was confined almost entirely to Dublin. The first day went pretty well, with the rebels taking control of the city and establishing the foundation of a government. [[Fail|Then the British army showed up with artillery and gunboats and started blasting them to shit]]. The uprising was suppressed by the end of the week, and the ringleaders were tried in military courts and executed. The executions and the brutal reprisals leveled by the British army, along with the murders of a bunch of unarmed civilians during the Rising, stoked public opinion in Ireland against the British and led to the rise of the nationalist party Sinn Fein, ultimately laying the grounds for the Irish War of Independence, the creation of the Irish Free State, and full independence in 1949.

===The Punitive Expedition===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. His actual reasons for this are unclear, but seizing supplies and/or trying to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was pretty small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

===The Warlord Era===
Around the same time, after the Boxer Rebellion failed to remove the Europeans from China, it became clear that Imperial China's days were over. After the forced abdication of the Qing Emperor, attempts to create a modern Chinese Republic quickly collapsed as regional warlords split the country among themselves, each intent on unifying China with themselves as its leader. Much like the Three Kingdoms period way back in early China, much of the military and political conflict was characterized by long, drawn-out border skirmishes with the occasional big battle, massive conscript armies, backstabbing, and leaders who were able to hold onto power so long as they had their army's loyalty. Due to an arms embargo and limited domestic manufacturing, industrialized warfare played a very limited role in the early part of the Warlord era; cavalry and bayonet charges were still viable, as very few warlords could afford the artillery and machine guns needed to make them obsolete. However, the eventual intervention of the Japanese eventually shifted the conflict away from a domestic dispute into a fight for China's survival against a technologically superior force, as covered in more detail below.

===The Empire of the Rising Sun===
Japan began emerging as something of the world power a few decades before the war. In 1854, the Japanese were peacefully telling foreigners to stay the fuck out of their country (a policy which hasn't really changed much to this day, only this time they are using things called "laws" instead of [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katanas]]) when suddenly this funny guy named Matthew Perry shows up with some warships. His purpose was to open Japan for business with the West, particularly America. Now contrary to many countries of the period that were forced to open trade at gunpoint, Japan was smart enough to realize that if they did not modernize, they'd be made someone else's bitch. This fate was something that the Japanese have loathed and regularly tried to avoid for their entire history. So after a brief civil war that may or may not have involved Tom Cruise, the Meiji dynasty was established. This began a period of rapid military, economic, and cultural expansion in Japan. Baseball is a popular sport in Japan because Japan took great early influence from the United States. They modeled themselves on Britain, especially its notions of empire, conquest, and spheres of influence; for quite a while, all orders in the Imperial Japanese Navy were given in English, not Japanese. Eventually, this led the Japanese into disagreements with the Russians over Manchurian China and the Kuril Islands. This was the cause of the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 shocked the dominant European powers because the Japanese had managed to defeat the supposedly superior Russians (though the fact of the matter was that both sides blundered hard and the weebs won because the other side was MUCH more incompetent and further from their supply lines - the Russian armada sent from the Baltic Sea to Japan suffered multiple breakdowns and almost started a war with Britain by firing on a British fishing fleet because they thought it was the Japanese). Japan was a member of the Triple Entente and as such seized some German islands in Asia, sent a small fleet into the Mediterranean to escort naval convoys and participated in an expedition alongside the US and European countries in Siberia after the revolution in Russia, but the main political activity was focused on exerting an ever increasing influence on China. After the war, Japan was awarded a permanent seat in the League of Nations, most of Germany's possessions in the Pacific, and recognition as a 'great power', but their proposal to be recognized as equals race-wise was rejected. This caused alienation from the Western powers, which in turn would partially contribute to [[RAGE|increased nationalism and militarism]] down the line.

==Side Note: The Shackleton Expedition and the End of the Age of Heroes==
Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic voyage and the perils they faced ending with the miraculous survival of all but three members and the ship's cat after incredible heroism occurred during the First World War in its entirety. Shackleton was sure that the war wouldn't last more than a few months after last hearing that Russia had mobilized and that there were some minor German victories. So what happened to the great hero and his crew of champions? They returned from their epic expedition the middle of 1916. When Shackleton asked the governor of South Georgia Island when the war had ended, the reply was that millions were dying, that Europe was mad, and that the World was mad. Expecting a well deserved hero's welcome, Shackleton and his men found abject, mute horror instead. Most of them volunteered to serve in minesweepers or on the front, and several were killed in action. Shackleton even demanded a frontline position despite his severe heart condition exacerbated by the nightmare he went through, though they resisted until the Allied intervention in the Arctic front of the Russian Civil War, where he worked until the Bolsheviks took that part and the war shifted to the Caucasus and when that was done through a deal with Turkish revolutionaries (more on that below) the chase to the Pacific across Asia. Shackleton himself passed away due to heart complications in 1922, perhaps the last larger than life hero before the world woke up to gritty reality.

==The Interwar Period==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919, being spot on}}
Believing that the world could not endure another such war, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted to set the groundwork for long-term peace between whites and "white equivalents"(Wilson was a massively racist cunt); he set forth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Unfortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (it was basically an even shittier proto-United Nations, in that at least the UN specialist agencies do important global coordination work). Most significantly, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in Congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European war.

Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge. Of note also was Wilson's hyper nationalism to the point he believed if everywhere was just like America it would be paradise on Earth, ironically being just as stubborn about forcing democracies and decolonisation as his allies were against the League despite the people involved not knowing a single thing about any of this stuff and nations (like Germany) not being too hot on democracies anyway leading to widespread political instability to the point some say (whether true or not) every issue of the modern day can somehow be traced back to this guy. He was also a huge dick on a personal level as well, the man was an exceptionally vile racist in a time when being racist was the norm. Got crippled by a stroke which precluded him from really doing anything mid-1919 onwards, killed his plans for reelection to a third term, then straight up killed him after his term was over.

Near the end of the First World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. [[Nurgle|The Spanish Flu]], which got its name because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war/didn't actively suppress the news of the epidemic, spread rapidly and killed millions thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various conflicts continued at the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French colonial forces, Islamists loyal to the Ottoman Government and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime.

The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarchy and the caliphate a year after the end of the monarchy and the Treaty of Lausanne, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing, with the only real big scare being the Bosphorus Straits affair with the Soviets, that was resolved through the Montreaux Convention in the 1930s. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

Compare this to America, which was having some of its best years. The aftermath of WWI and the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty had seen Britain concede that it could no longer maintain the two-power standard, since: 1. it couldn't afford to keep spending that kind of money and 2. this would have required the Royal Navy to compete with the US Navy, which was a friend and ally as opposed to a potential threat. As a result, the US Navy managed to achieve parity with the Royal Navy fairly quickly during the interwar period. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. Presidents Harding and Coolidge lead the country into great economic growth, to the point that most of the world would look to the NYSE as an indicator of economic health. See, unlike the European powers, it hadn't seen the deaths of millions of young men, been forced to reorient itself to the demands of a continental total war, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that happen and was taken over by communists after a civil war like Russia (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war, meaning that the country was flush with cash.

Coolidge would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). [[FAIL|Then in October of 1929 the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.]], officially earning Hoover a place as one of the worst presidents in American history.

There had been a series of stock market crashes in the US every decade or so during the the 19th century, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment becoming commonplace, loans for buying stock with, a lot of scams and the limits of the real economy which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery.

It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle-scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now tottering under the weight of an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. It culminated in a French occupation of some of the last profitable land left in Germany, the Ruhr valley, and eventually lead to a renegotiation of the payments that would be more generous to the German economy. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across whole states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things didn't seem to be working and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008, after New Deal-era financial regulations were pulled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Italy ===
See [[Fascist Italy]]. Shortly put though, as the Italians are not entirely to blame, this guy named Mussolini created a new ideology that seemed pretty snazzy, called Fascism<sup>1</sup>, that combined big government and ultra-nationalist militarism into another toxic ideology that advocated the strength and growth of the state. Italian Fascism is found in a manifesto of sorts written by Giovanni Gentile in the seminal work "The Doctrine of Fascism" for those interested in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_98uT1IZs&t=1s&ab_channel=RyanChapman|further research]. He also ruled for far longer than Hitler did, taking over as "Prime Minister" in 1922 until his removal in 1943.

The Italians conquered Ethiopia to reclaim their national honor after getting wrecked by them, and had a general foreign policy of attempting to promote international fascism. By which of course the end result would be an Italian sphere of influence. This is represented in HOI4 by the Albania tree, the attempts at Turkish influence, and their intervention in the Spanish Civil War along with the Germans. For all intents and purposes, Mussolini seemed very genuine in his intent to promote Fascism across the globe to not only promote Italian interests but to correct the "failures of liberalism" and counter those filthy Communists<sup>2</sup>. It also helps that the leader of such a movement could become wealthy and powerful as a result.

<small><sup>1</sup>Fascism with a capital "F" refers specifically to Italian fascism. With a little "f", it is a noun describing a broad ideology. [[Tzeentch|Nazism is fascist, but not "Fascist".]] [[What|Savvy?]]</small>

<small><sup>2</sup>Fascism was a reaction against the Russian Revolution and the chaos of post-war Italy. Mussolini came to power by leading a bunch of nationalist thugs that beat up Socialists and Communists in Northern Italy and eventually the Italian King and the old-school conservatives made him Prime Minister as he seemed to be effective against them.</small>

===Rise of Authoritarians: Germany===
In Germany, the economic and political failures of the Weimar Republic soured people on the whole idea of democracy, which contributed to the rise of authoritarian parties on the left like the Communist KPD, which in turn led to the creation of the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party or NSDAP) party to counter them (possibly with help from other Western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations Germany was forced to pay to the rest of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, which renegotiated or not, still put a perceived blame for the war unjustly upon them along with a variety of other complicated things that can be blamed on the [[Nazi|Nazis]]. Rounding it off was the ''Dolchstosslegende'', or "stab-in-the-back-myth", that was concocted by butthurt imperial generals like Ludendorff and Hindenburg in order to shift the blame for Germany's defeat to the Social Democrats or the [[What|historic enemy of Germany, the Jews.]]

The concurrent deeply authoritarian political culture of many German institutions as well as reactionary and monarchist industrialists like Krupp, who all backed Hitler and nationalist and antisemitic parties similar to the NSDAP (like the DNVP) and the lack of people actually willing to give a damn about the Republic itself led to the erosion of the few democratic principles left at this point. From 1930 onward, Hindenburg, who was elected President as the candidate of a coalition of nationalist and conservative parties, reigned over Germany in a dictatorial manner and named Hitler as Chancellor and head of government in January 1933, after two governments under the centrist-conservative Party Zentrum and the Nationalist DNVP failed to stabilize the economy. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up for war, and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmament were certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France after the bloodbath of the Western Front.

To their credit, in the mid '30s the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between completing the Autobahn, hosting the Olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. When the communists tried to launch a revolution in Spain, Germany and Italy sent weapons and eventually troops to curbstomp them and test out their new toys on people with wrong opinions, while Britain looked the other way and pretended not to notice that Germany suddenly had hundreds of tanks that they were legally not supposed to have, and that France and the Soviets were doing the same thing with the communist revolutionaries. So nobody was too concerned when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in the border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Then shit started to get real.

In 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, which was a direct violation of both treaties. Britain and France were concerned, but neither country was ready to go to war again, so they let it slide. Hitler took this as confirmation that they wouldn't do shit to stop him and ramped up his plans for rearmament and conquest. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria more or less peacefully, then walked into Czechoslovakia and took the Sudetenland, home to 3 million ethnic Germans. The rest of the continent was getting increasingly worried, but Hitler super-duper promised that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial acquisition, cross his heart and hope to die. Britain and France were desperate to avoid war, and Hungary and Poland also wanted some of Czechoslovakia's turf, so together they strong-armed Czechoslovakia into signing the Munich Agreement, officially ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed that the Agreement was "peace for our time" when he came home from the negotiations on 30 September 1938. A pissed-off Winston Churchill correctly predicted that Hitler wasn't going to stop at the Sudetenland, and was proven right when Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then started side-eyeing Poland and the former German territories it now controlled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Japan===
In the 19th century the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would come by and stomp all over them like they did China and Southeast Asia. During the Tokugawa period, military technology had basically stagnated as there were no pressing internal or external threats that required [[Dakka|shootier guns]] or better tactics to sort out. There was much anxiety in the Tokugawa Shogunate about this (and even a limited attempt at army modernization by at least one Japanese domain) but things came to a head in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour and ended two centuries of isolation at cannon-point. The end of the Sakoku and bombardments by US and Royal Navy ships drove the necessity of modernization home. The Shogunate bought foreign guns and ships, lifted restrictions on shipbuilding and sent diplomatic missions abroad, but the pace of modernization and Westernization really picked up after the Meiji Restoration. By 1914 Japan had a solid public education system and set of universities, a well-developed rail network, a respectable industrial base and an army and navy which had beaten the Russian Empire. In the Great War they drove the German Empire out of the Pacific. Japan had arrived on the world stage, but despite that they were still concerned about the West and its influence, what with Britain and France being two of the largest and most acquisitive colonial powers on Earth. The Japanese saw what had happened to their neighbors and wanted no part of it. Combine this with a historic ''extreme'' hard on for cultural and political independence that can still be observed to this very day, and you start to get the anxiety faced by Imperial Japan.

Even so while the Meiji Restoration was successful in its general goals, it had its faults. It did end the Tokugawa class system and introduced a parliament, but it was still largely a system set up for the benefit of a small number of well connected oligarchs. The franchise was limited to only 1% of the population, with the prominent lordlings and industrialists who'd backed the Emperor in the Boshin War and their kids being disproportionately prominent in Japanese society. There would be considerable push for reform after the Great War (in particular there was universal male suffrage in 1925), but there would also be strong pushback by conservatives and militarist ultranationalists, especially after a huge earthquake devastated Tokyo in 1926 and the Great Depression came along to wallop the Japanese economy. Unlike their later partners in the Axis, there was no Japanese Hitler or Mussolini figure who masterminded and led a movement which came to dictate authority. Instead Japan had a collection of right-wing cranks and extremists and a military which was off the chain. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were loyal only to the Emperor (and in practice they just did whatever they wanted and asked the Emperor for permission after the fact) and the Diet had very little power over them at the best of times. Technically the Meiji Parliament continued to putter on, but from 1931-45 it was marginalized and subverted. Whenever prominent liberals and socialists who oppose rampant militarism get ganked by radical thugs who are pardoned by judges who are either on board with the militarists or afraid that they'll get ganked themselves, the power and influence of said nationalist militarists will steadily grow until they can more or less do as they please, specifically getting their imperialism on.

Even though the Japanese had managed to modernize rapidly in a short span of time and kicked the shit out of the Russians, they were still often seen as inferiors by white people, [[Imperial Japanese Equipment|"yellow monkeys who could only copy what white folk invented" and other such nonsense]]. Some people like Wilhelm II and some nativist shitheads in the US, Canada and Australia saw the Japanese and East Asians in general as still being lesser, but still capable enough to be a threat ("The Yellow Peril"). When the League of Nations was founded, the Japanese had a seat at the table and the Japanese Ambassador requested that its charter have a non-binding statement on human equality<small><sup>3</sup></small>, which got some support, but Woodrow Wilson vehemently shot it down, mostly because this would require him to see [[Tyranids|minorities as anything other than evil cockroaches trying to devour the white man]], and GOLLY GEE WE CAN'T HAVE THAT NOW CAN WE? This sort of thing breeds animosity at the best of times, and these times were anything but.

Things got worse with the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22, which was called by the Allied powers in an effort to prevent another naval arms race like the one that had led into the war. The practical result of the conference and its treaty was to impose strict limits on the size and firepower of capital ships and aircraft carriers and downsize the British, American, and Japanese fleets by scrapping obsolete or unfinished ships. It also saw the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance that had been signed in 1902, since the American delegates made it clear that the US felt threatened by this alliance and the British themselves weren't too sure about it anymore. Japan took both of these actions as an insult, especially the tonnage ratio imposed by the treaty, which was 5:5:3 UK/US/Japan. This meant that for every five tons of capital ship that the British and Americans built, the Japanese were only allowed to have 3 tons. The Japanese militarists and ultranationalists who'd demanded naval parity with the UK and US saw this as an insult, though a number of Japanese Navy officers, including Isoroku Yamamoto, actually supported the treaty, since they knew that Japan could never outproduce the United States. He and the "Treaty Faction" were largely ignored, and when Japan couldn't get better results at the London Naval Treaties in the 1930s, they flipped everyone the bird and started building ships that ignored the treaty limitations.

From the Meiji period onward some prominent Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves<small><sup>4</sup></small>, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward. Their first steps were pretty humble, taking back some of the Kuril Islands, Okinawa, etc. Then they stomped into Korea, renamed Taiwan "Formosa" because fuck your local names, and then logically jumped into trying to conquer all of China.

Imperialism and colonialism? No, we're doing this in the name of Asian liberation, friend! A "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" if you will. Pay no mind to the [[Grimdark|atrocious war crimes we're about to be committing]]. The Japanese kept this going into the 20th century when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after 1931, by which time the military more or less dictated the course of Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria and made it into a puppet state under the deposed Qing emperor, then invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went (around four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of the Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR efforts). Japanese forces in China occasionally attacked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Panay_incident foreign shipping], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kweilin_incident airliners], and property. Despite this, international reactions were fairly limited — the European powers were too busy worrying about Herr Hitler and Nazi Germany and America had profitable trade agreements with Japan.

* <small><sup>3</sup>Yes, there was an element of hypocrisy in the Empire of Japan making this statement. But Wilson was probably too racist to understand this or care.</small>
* <small><sup>4</sup>See previous footnote, the Japanese were very racist towards Koreans and Chinese, especially during the height of militarism. They just wanted to be the ones who were conquering all of Asia, not the Western powers.</small>

==The Second World War==
===The War in the West===
See also [[Nazi]]s and [[Fascist Italy]].

With Poland unwilling to roll over for Hitler, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist). Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. (What actually happened was this: a Polish cavalry detachment surprised and overran a group of German infantry who were taking a rest and were in turn driven off by machine gun fire from some armored cars; the actual tanks didn't show up until it was all over. Later on, German and Italian war correspondents were shown the battlefield with the tanks parked nearby and cooked up the story of "these brave dumbasses charged our tanks with lances and sabers".) But after a month of hard fighting with no help from Britain or France and with the Soviets entering the war and overrunning much of the country's western half, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, German soldiers called the period between October 1939 and June 1940 the ''Sitzkrieg'', or "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the northeast part of France in anticipation of the inevitable assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be impenetrable to the German army, as it was believed that the mobility of German tanks would be fatally hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the panzers blew through the Ardennes in days, completely buttfucking France's entire defensive strategy. France, which had held out through four years of brutal attritional warfare in 1914-1918, fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought quite hard and inflicted casualties on the German invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military ''was'' stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they ''could'' win. The Germans' success came down to several factors: tactics that focused on speed, shock, and mobility; excellent close air support from the Luftwaffe; high levels of coordination thanks to the widespread use of radio; and hard-driving generals who spotted opportunities and seized them without consulting with high command, following the longstanding Prussian-German principle of independence in the field. Combine all of these with a healthy dose of luck, and you have a perfect explanation of why the Germans succeeded. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, the British Expeditionary Force's famous evacuation from Dunkirk, and Germany annexing the north of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

After France fell, Germany went on a spree of conquest that would give any [[Axis & Allies]] or ''Hearts of Iron'' player a colossal throbbing war-boner: they overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece in the space of a year, stunning the rest of the world. It wasn't all roses for the Nazis, of course; there were large and active partisan movements in all the territories they conquered, and the invasion of the Balkans and Greece was largely because Italy had got itself spanked trying to throw its weight around in the region and ran crying to Germany for help. The latter two campaigns tied the Wehrmacht up for several months on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, potentially costing them critical time that they could have used to get to Moscow before winter set in.

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle. Chamberlain was out as prime minister after having been humiliated by Hitler's pissing all over his hard diplomatic work, and Winston Churchill was in. A man with an iron will and indomitable resolve, he led his country through the loss of HMS ''Hood'', the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain, and the fall of Burma, Crete, Malaya, and Singapore. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldiers that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the ''Bismarck'' and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch landings.

Meanwhile, the USSR and Germany had been circling each other like prizefighters before a bout. Their nonaggression pact notwithstanding, each country regarded the other as an existential threat. Hitler wanted the vast territories and resources that Russia had to offer, and he regarded the Russian people as subhuman Bolsheviks who needed to be exterminated or enslaved for the good of the Greater German Reich. Stalin, meanwhile, saw the Nazis as a pack of murderous fascists who would need to be dealt with before they could ruin the glorious USSR. Thus, even while they dismembered Poland together, the two countries were plotting to take each other down. Germany struck first, launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hilariously enough, Stalin refused to believe that the invasion was occurring at first, in spite of repeated warnings from his spies, allies, and generals. He even threatened to court-martial or execute some of the officers who first reported that the Germans were pouring across the border from Poland. Initially, Barbarossa looked like it was going to be another walkover for the Wehrmacht, since the Red Army was in a bad way. Stalin's paranoid purges in the 1930s had gotten rid of most of the army's competent, professional officers, leaving it to be led by incompetent yes-men and/or inexperienced junior officers. It was also caught in a doctrinal bind regarding the employment of its armored forces and suffering from low institutional morale because of the rough handling they'd received at the hands of the Finnish Army in the Winter War. Because of this, the Wehrmacht beat the absolute shit out of the Red Army at first, wiping out or capturing entire army groups along with seizing the entirety of Ukraine and a reasonably large slice of western Russia. Fortunately for the Soviets, the Germans spread themselves thinly enough, and the Red Army managed to fight just hard enough, that the Wehrmacht didn't make it to Moscow in time. The infamously brutal Russian winter forced the Germans to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, suffering tremendous casualties from the cold, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in the Red Army's scorched earth retreats.

===American Rearmament===
This whole time the American public had been watching the developing war. Chief among them was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was not a fan of Adolf, mostly because FDR hated imperialism (he actively worked to release the Philippines from the US - the only reason that fell through was because the Filipinos could see the Japanese quite obviously eyeing them up - and was pivotal in creating a post-war environment that would destroy the colonial regimes of Britain and France.) He convinced Congress to send increasingly generous aid to Britain, start pouring funds into the military, instituted a peacetime draft, and generally put the US into a state of readiness for war.

In spite of these changes, the American public was generally lukewarm on the idea of war in Europe, as they had been thirty years previously; they were content to let the Europeans kill each other and live their lives unbothered by the Old World's problems. Besides, the Depression was still going on, and the last thing people wanted was even more misery on top of that. Like Wilson, FDR realized that he could not go to war without changing the public's perception, so this explains the "slow" manner in which the US built up its military infrastructure. Instead, he and the generals and admirals took notes and watched carefully from the sidelines, gradually taking a more pro-Allied stance by escorting transports, allowing American destroyers to "defend business interests" in convoys, and building up a tank force and air force. Everything was going fine until the Japanese Navy ran up and kicked America in the balls at Pearl Harbor.

Rather than being shocked into peace talks or ineffectiveness, the entire country became extraordinarily pissed and Congress declared war the next day. Recruitment offices were overrun with men willing and eager to fight, and promising officers such as Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Doolittle were given important assignments. "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a rallying cry among the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur was determined to regain his prestige after the Philippines were lost under his command. Europe probably still would've been a tough sell, even with the American public ripshit pissed and out for revenge, but Hitler and the rest of the Axis neatly solved that problem by declaring war on the US right after the Pearl Harbor strike, and just like that, America was committed to the whole World War shebang.

===Mid-War===
The mid-war refers largely to the conclusion of the African campaign and the fall of Italy, and the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Freeaboos first forayed into the world of dying hard on beaches during the Torch landings, where a combination of inexperienced troops and lackluster leadership, poor logistical planning, bad intel, and a bunch of pointless and stupid red tape from the somewhat uncooperative Vichy colonial administration resulted in needless casualties. The results would be studied, with promising results for future campaigns.

After Operation Torch, the Allies pushed with great difficulty into Tunisia, cutting the Axis army off from resupply and ensuring that they couldn't be evacuated. With the Americans coming in from the west and Montgomery's army in the east, the Axis army in Tunisia was surrounded and captured with great difficulty, due to the mountainous and hilly terrain. The complete lack of useful military infrastructure that had not been left to rot by Petain made the logistics a nightmare. From there, they began preparing their next operation, which was the invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.

While the Allies were establishing a base for Free France and picking away at Italy, the Germans and Soviets were beating the absolute fuck out of each other at Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a strategically important city; its position meant that it controlled access to the oil fields of the Caucasus and passage along the Volga River, one of Russia's major waterways. Whoever controlled the city would control both of these critical resources. Besides this, Stalingrad was also a symbolically important city, since it was named after old Josef himself; losing it would have humiliated him and the Red Army. The Germans attacked the city as part of Case Blue, a general invasion of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Unfortunately for them, city fights were exactly the kind of thing their technology and tactics weren't designed for. The Wehrmacht's superiority over the Red Army at this stage of the war depended on its mobility, shock power, and armored formations. The urban combat in Stalingrad deprived them of all of these advantages, sucking them into a 5-month meat grinder of a siege that functionally destroyed any value the city would have had along with the entirety of their supplies. The Russian 62nd Army fought for literally every inch of the city, fueled by rage, patriotism, and desperation; even when the oil depots were set on fire, the city was bombed into rubble, and the Germans had driven them into a tiny pocket on the banks of the Volga, they refused to quit, hanging on and fighting tooth and nail. Ultimately, the Russians managed to encircle Friedrich Paulus and the 6th Army and fight off all attempts at relief from outside the pocket, resulting in the surrender of over 250,000 German soldiers, only 5,000 of whom would live to see home a decade later.

The landings on Sicily and Italy were enough to force Mussolini out of power, and Italy promptly changed sides to fight for the Allies. However, the theorized soft underbelly of Italy was anything but, as its rugged, mountainous terrain proved difficult for the Allies to traverse. The Germans had also predicted that Italy would hit the "change team" button and immediately executed Operation Axis, which subdued and dismembered the Italian army, stole all its equipment, and effectively seized control of the country, while a commando raid on Mussolini's prison successfully freed Il Duce. This resulted in Mussolini being established as a puppet governor in Northern Italy until he was killed by partisans, while the Germans dug into the Apennines and refused to shift. This prevented the Allies from making any meaningful progress towards Germany through Italy.

===The Normandy landings===
{{topquote|So much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide.|President Barack Obama, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day}}

Yes, Normandy gets its own section. See, the Americans had long wanted to just land in France and bash the Nazis to death much like what Sherman had done to the CSA in the American Civil War. The British managed to convince the Americans that Africa would allow them to isolate a large number of Axis troops that could not be replaced from Europe, and if Stalin continued to bleed them dry, they could take Italy. The disastrous Dieppe raid also convinced Eisenhower to shelve the idea as untenable at the moment.

Flash forward to 1944 and Italy is a stalemate, though Russia is in a much better spot due to lend-lease and having managed to relocate most of its heavy industry beyond the Urals. Stalin wants the Americans to open up another front to take pressure off of him, and the Allies oblige by preparing one of the most complicated and carefully planned landings in human history: Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of Normandy. Overlord had intelligence gathered from old Time-Life magazines, commandos, partisans, postcards, scientific reports, and anything else they could get their hands on. Weather patterns were traced back decades to predict for an ideal time to land, swimming tanks were developed, and two mobile ports were developed to help unload equipment due to the lack of ports near the beaches. On top of all that, the Allies launched a massive counter-intelligence operation, mainly convincing the Germans that a massive army group (made up of balloons to fool observation craft) stationed in Kent and led by General Patton would attack Calais. They even went one step further by dressing up the corpse of a dead homeless man as a fake intelligence officer that "drowned" off the coast of "Neutral" Spain, with fake documents of fake landing plans. It was obvious that Churchill had been so shaken by Gallipoli that he wanted to leave nothing to chance this time around.

In spite of these preparations, Eisenhower was not totally convinced they would succeed, and prior to the landings wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure of the landings. This never happened, thankfully, but the rest of the Battle of Normandy was not just on the beaches. American and British paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to hold back reinforcements and seize or demolish important enemy infrastructure, attack aircraft strafed and bombed German positions for miles around, and the strategic bombers of the USAAF were diverted from pounding German industry to provide aid. Once Normandy had been secured, it was now the beginning of the end.

===Victory in Europe===
After liberating France and Belgium, the Western Allies marched on Germany's border at the Rhine River while the Soviets blew through Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany before bumrushing Berlin. The Germans launched several desperate counter-attacks to try and break the Allies' will to fight, including the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the last-ditch offensives in Hungary and Romania. It prevented the Western Allies from pushing further than West Germany and insured the longevity of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

By this time, FDR was finally starting to realized that all the nasty things Churchill had been saying about Stalin were true; he was a liar and a paranoid, tyrannical sociopath hell-bent on carving out a swath of European territory to expand Communism and Soviet influence. While FDR's ambitions to allow countries to have their own say in their governance would be realized in the 30 years after August 1945, many countries of the Eastern Bloc would remain under the hammer and sickle as "satellite states". Even a brief attempted rebellion by the Poles to reestablish their country was brutally put down by the Nazis, while the Soviets sat on the outskirts of Warsaw and watched.

In the Battle of Berlin, the Germans fought ferociously against the Soviets, but Hitler took his life in the hours preceding the Soviets occupying the Reichstag and declaring victory. The official cessation of hostilities occurred on May 8 1945. This is known as VE Day, though in Russia it is called Victory Day, in honor of the tremendous sacrifices the men of the Red Army made during the many battles in which they fought against the German Heer.

===The War in the East===
As Japan continued to push deeper into China and signed the Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany, the US threatened to embargo the oil, steel, and aircraft parts Japan needed to keep their massive war machine running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]], except they fucked up the timing and the declaration wasn't delivered until Pearl Harbor had already been bombed to shit).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over a bunch of distant islands that didn't even belong to them (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damage, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the industrial capacity that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel and resources. <small>''To be fair, nobody* in the years leading up to World War II '''expected''' carriers to be important.''</small> Another big failure of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fact that the Japanese attack didn't touch the dockyards, dry docks, fuel depots, command centers, and the rest of the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after its ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-imperialist/nationalist ideologies, but this only reinforced the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

Despite America's obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering the Americans (who had to split their fleets across two oceans to protect against German U-boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the war in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when [[Tactical genius|Admiral Chester Nimitz]] intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying four veteran aircraft carriers, about half of the IJN's total carrier capacity at the time. This blunted the Japanese advance and threw them onto the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain. It also didn't hurt that [[Spy|American and British Naval Intelligence]] partially deciphered most Japanese naval codes in 1942.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics. The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign combined to put the IJN on the back foot; Midway cost them four carriers and a bunch of their best carrier aviators, and the prolonged attritional fighting in the Solomons cost them many more of their pilots, along with dozens of valuable ships that they couldn't afford to replace. The Japanese now found themselves as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese-occupied island from their well dug in defenders — and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots where they could do fuck-all except die slowly from starvation and disease. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War II standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. [[RAGE|Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.]]

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly, as they were in no position to hold their gains against the Allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it led to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also led to the disillusionment of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them off the mainland and out to Taiwan, and found the Chinese People's Republic in 1949.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the ''Yamato'', and her support fleet, sortied to support the Japanese Army on Okinawa ... and were promptly destroyed by massed American airpower before they got 100 miles from Japan. This cemented the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare from battleship fleets to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

===The Manhattan Project===
{{topquote|Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.|Robert Oppenheimer}}
{{topquote|Now we are all sons of bitches.|Kenneth Bainbridge}}

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

The bombs weren't ready in time to use against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is [[Skub|controversial]] [[SJW|depending]] [[/pol/|on]] [[Communism|who]] [[Japan|you ask]], and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up at Pearl, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]]. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations, with the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in its last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. This committee dissolved itself on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.

==Notes==
[[File:Cathedral Radio.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''"...We now return to the adventures of Bobby Gill and the Imperium Boys, brought to you by George Rough Ridin' Martin's Jackets. Bundle up tight, because Winter is Coming!"'']]
*Radio! While radio was being used for communications and there were a few experimental broadcasts here and there since the beginning of the twentieth century, it really took off in the 1920s as a revolutionary new form of mass media. Radios meant that for the first time you could beam music, news and other such information directly into people's homes. Radio systems (both transmitters and especially receivers) were cheap to make and comparatively easy to use and maintain. Naturally everyone wanted in on this pie from radio companies to the Americans to the Brits to the Japanese to the Soviets to the Nazis. In particular the Nazis mass produced millions of cheap [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger ''Volksempfanger''] radio sets to get one in every german house to feed a steady stream of Nazi propaganda to the German masses. FDR's famous "fireside chats" were made possible by radio, as was the speed and shock power that defined ''Blitzkrieg''.
**A quirk of Radio of this time was as a major part of the standardization of language. Beforehand most people learned how to speak from their families, friends and neighbours and accents were far more pronounced. While other things such as railways and records had some impact, having a radio set meant that there was a voice being piped into your parlour every day. It also meant that the speaker needed a Radio Voice: something which was legible to the audience especially with the crappy speakers of the early 20th century. In the UK this lead to Received Pronunciation (the clipped middle class UK accent the Imperials use in Star Wars) while in the US they went with the Midatlantic Accent (that sort of posh way you here people talk in old hollywood movies) and eventually a Midwestern Accent.
*During this time science fiction began to catch on to a wider audience. As new technologies increasingly transformed people's lives, there was interest in what the future might be like. At the same time, radio and pulp magazines gave sci-fi writers a new means to get their message out in a way that was both cheap and offered exposure to a wide audience. Ideas such as Rockets, Robots, the towering cities of the future, day to day life in them and the future of human evolution were all discussed. The downside of this was that there was also a ''lot'' of crap, since lowering the barrier of entry meant that a bunch of low end crud could be shovelled out onto the market and the editors of the magazines were often more interested in filling pages for next week's edition than putting out quality material. Even so, it did have a widespread impact. Astounding Stories magazine editor John W. Campbell got questioned by the FBI in 1944 about a story he had written about the possibility of atomic warfare and he worked out that the Manhattan Project was based at Los Alamos because of a sudden change in mailing addresses of a lot of his readers.
*Art Deco became a thing during this time and remains iconic to this day. Breaking with traditional European styles, its stylized forms, smooth lines and embellishments became widely popular. In particular, Art Deco often tried to capture a sense of motion which was important in an era when cars, planes and trains were seen as the main signs of technological triumph.
* Fordism and Taylorism! Henry Ford was a big pioneer in assembly line manufacturing, employing specialized machines to streamline production with every step tightly choreographed to shave seconds off the process. Ford himself was a disciple of Frederich Taylor, who focused on analysis and optimization (finding out how a worker did X, Y and Z and working out the best way to do the task). Fordism was the gold standard that everyone aspired to during this time period: American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet. On the other hand it could be really fucking boring for the people on the line whose job was to slot one bit of metal into another every twenty seconds for eight hours a day. It would remain king until the Japanese worked out Just-In-Time manufacturing in the 60s.
* These improvements in manufacturing evolved further with the invention of modern quality control. While America did have the largest manufacturing base at the start of WWII, it experienced many teething problems such as explosive shells failing to explode, or vehicle parts not being cross-compatible between factories. And without extremely tight tolerances, many newer technologies couldn’t be developed. New disciplines in measuring tolerances and conforming to standards helped improve the quality of these technologies. After the war, though, these standards were gradually relaxed as meeting them was expensive and American civilian manufacturers had little economic reason to make extremely high quality products, what with most of their competitors trying to rebuild from the war. Ironically enough, it would be the Japanese that would rediscover and improve upon QA tools to become an economic powerhouse in the postwar era.
* The [[Superhero]] Genre was born on the eve of WWII with the publication of Superman and exploded during the war. If a lucky American kid in the 1940s found a shiny nickel, the latest edition of Superman or Captain America would be high up the list on what they'd spend it on. Thus a cultural legacy was born that would resound for decades to come.
*In dribs and drabs the elements of fantasy literature were beginning to come together. The first Conan the Barbarian was written in 1932 and the [[The Hobbit]] was released in 1937. [[The Lord of the Rings]] was written from 1940-49, though it would be released in the '50s. Not really a cohesive whole yet, but all the pieces were there and coming together.
* Everybody smoked like fucking chimneys. In the late 19th century cigarette-making machines were developed and cigarette companies started using modern advertisement methods. Cigarettes were advertised to soldiers in WWI as a way to "relieve stress" which family members could send to the front as gifts, to women as "torches of freedom" in the 20s and 30s, and in WWII the cigarette companies made deals with the military to provide cigarettes as part of every soldier's ration pack. The link between tobacco and lung cancer was first found in 1939 by Franz Muller (and highly politically motivated at that, as Hitler famously hated cigarette smoke), but his work was met with reasonable if misplaced skepticism given that it was done in Nazi Germany and it would not be until 1950 that non-Nazis came to the same conclusions. (Hitler of all people was famed for his anti-smoking stance; he harangued his friends and cronies endlessly about the negative effects of cigarettes and even offered them gold watches as an incentive to quit.) By 1945, the average American adult smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year. True Anti-Smoking campaigns like we see today, and the general trend of people quitting smoking is only a very recent occurrence though. Just zap into any archived footage of a talk show on TV of that time and you will be amazed at how casually everyone has their own personal ash tray and is sucking on cigars and cigarettes.
** As a sidenote, Cigarette brands were one of the avenues American cultural influence started to slowly entrench itself into the public consciousness in western countries and revolutionized product advertisement. Before WW2, most countries had their own Tobacco industries, especially France and Germany, and every country their own local brands of cigarettes. The introduction of the much smoother American Virginia tobaccos changed global tastes in tobacco significantly; the old traditional European brands (like Roth-Händle or Gauloises before they were bought out) were reviled by younger people who didn't enjoy the sensation of having their lungs forcibly cut out by Cigarettes with lovely nicknames such as "Lung Torpedo". Marlboro, Lucky Strike and Camel were pushed by novel advertising strategies that emphasized brand recognition over the quality of the product itself, so if you wonder why Coca-Cola somehow still feels the need to spend millions each year on advertising, this is why.

==The appeal of the World Wars==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across entire continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern war was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval and air wars in the Pacific, the grinding hell in the Eastern Front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities. Ernest Shackleton is perhaps the perfect example. He journeyed out to the Antarctic believing the war would soon be over, then returned to find that it had become a nightmare with no end in sight, a unique perspective.

Of these two conflicts, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, and the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear "right" side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. It's hard to make easily dehumanized rank-and file villains for a narrative when the soldiers of neither side actually want to be fighting at all.

When it was all over, the country that got blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved, so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a pointless and wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WWI was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. Richthofen was the most famous fighter ace of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, as a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down when a few small mutinies arose over the matter. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive and as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other. Sometimes temporary truces were declared for around kilometer wide sectors to clear corpses, but that was about it.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs. Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium and probably forever). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WWII also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WWI, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember the deeds of Simo Häyhä or Audie Murphy than say, Alvin York (They all have Sabaton songs though!)).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

==World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the [[Death Korps of Krieg]], the [[Armageddon Steel Legion]], and the [[Valhallan Ice Warriors]].
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of [[Steampunk]]. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* [[Wolfenstein]], both the classic and reboot settings, are focused on fighting the Nazis and their Wunderwaffen. WWII gets dragged on by many decades thanks to some crazy antics including transdimensional portals, spacebases on Venus, etc.
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Poland, and Russia that's in the middle of transitioning from Imperial to Soviet, in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state. America also makes an appearance as a major air power, favoring battleship blimps and other wacky aircraft, in a campaign very reminiscent of Laurence of Arabia.
* Never Going Home is a fairly new RPG system that takes place from 1916-1918 where fighting in the Somme ripped open a goddamn hole in reality, and now eldritch beings are whispering in the ears of soldiers and telling them how to summon demons powered by the general misery caused by the conditions of trench warfare. Fun times!

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

The World Wars

2023-06-06T03:18:07Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Additional Factors */

{{Grimdark}}
[[File:MAC52_SIDEBAR_TANKS01-810x445.jpg|thumb|right|War has changed...]]
{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}

Unless you've been living under a rock in Antarctica for the past 80-odd years, there is a chance you've heard of the World Wars. They were some of the most devastating conflicts ever waged by mankind. Even today there are still noticeable economic, demographic, and ecological effects from the raw amount of destruction wrought during both wars. For all intents and purposes, the World Wars are the closest we have ever gotten to [[Warhammer 40,000]].

A brief introduction is difficult to write, but for World War I, M.A.I.N.(Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism) largely sums it up. When most people think of WWI, they envision trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, and massive artillery barrages. Meanwhile, World War II can be summarized as some [[pol|dickhead using conspiracy theories about Jews]] and geopolitics to start a war that rapidly boiled into a massive clusterfuck. When people think WWII, they typically think of Nazis, D-Day, America, the Holocaust, and maybe the Battle of Britain/Pearl Harbor/Stalingrad, depending on where they're from.

The World Wars have served as inspiration for hundreds of games, uncounted thousands of novels and comics, hundreds of movies, [[Warhammer 40,000|dozens]] [[Lord of the Rings|of]] [[Star Wars|franchises]], and overall have left a lasting impact on most of the globe, with the only minor caveat being South America. If you were to go anywhere in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, the Middle East, North Africa, China, or Russia and ask people to share stories of their relatives from either conflict, there is a good chance that someone will have a story for you to hear.

The World Wars resulted in the end of unmatched European global dominance, the collapse of the great imperial powers, and the rise of the United States and Soviet Union until the latter's collapse in 1991. The world we currently lived in has been made entirely possible by the tragedy that was the two World Wars.

==Prelude==
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century kicked off with the Napoleonic Wars when industrialization was building up steam in England, and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers<sup>1,</sup><sup>2</sup>. The American Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era and saw about 600,000-750,000 people dead but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and the issue of Slavery had been resolved. The Franco-Prussian War was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling preview of things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Many Europeans figured that in this new civilized age big wars were a thing of the past, that if war happened it would be resolved quickly with one side throwing in the towel and cutting their losses when things turned south. In the Spring of 1914 few in Europe realized that they were sitting on not only a political powder keg but also a barrel of napalm.

There are two important factors to consider in the buildup to the World Wars: ''Technology'' and ''Nationalism''. Technology is the easier of the two to understand. In the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 yards, was supported by muzzle-loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1 km, and was supplied by ox carts. Meanwhile, steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. By 1914, the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by breech-loading guns that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air, raining a spray of shrapnel over a wide area, machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute, and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, submachine guns, and chemical weapons had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were less than useless on this new kind of battlefield, and the book needed to be re-written from page one.

Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an industrialized nation could turn more of its population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do. As a specific example, Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of its population even at the peak of its power, whereas Germany mobilized nearly 20% of its population during the Great War. This period of peace had consequences in that no one had any good idea how to wage war with or against these newfangled contraptions besides [[Imperial Guard|sending in the next wave]]. People were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London whose dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich whose mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their family, job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with on a daily basis). If a civil war happened and a new noble house ended up in charge while they and their family and friends got through unharmed, they weren't going to care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties and wasn't a huge dick. There was a king somewhere and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all well and good, but politics was generally an abstract that had little to do with their everyday lives.

This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and escalated throughout the Age of Enlightenment as mass propaganda started to become a thing, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their weird languages and customs. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to instill these ideals into everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations with nationalistic populations and governments and other influential groups fond of egging nationalistic sentiment on, it doesn't take much to get them at each other's throats and keep them there.

Intertwined with nationalism is the issue of "Balance of Power"; since the end of the Thirty Years War, the various European powers had been very conscious about preventing any one nation from becoming too powerful and exerting their authority over everyone else. None of them wanted to fight a massive war that would screw everyone else over, and for the most part this rule was followed by everyone except Napoleon, who had great ambitions for France and is mostly vilified for that reason, among others.

This was one of the motivating factors behind such actions as the race to colonize Africa, the "Great Game" between Russia & Britain over India, the War of Spanish Succession where Britain and the Holy Roman Empire fought to prevent the union of France & Spain, or the clusterfuck that was the Crimean War, where a dispute over churches in the Ottoman Empire led to Britain and France declaring war on Russia, only for neither side to gain anything and lose a lot of men and respect. Napoleon had gotten damn near close to completely dominating Europe, but the alliance system played a major role in ensuring no one would get too sabre-rattly... up until Germany unified and changed the whole playing field, leaving politicians desperate and uncertain as to how far Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to go to prove Germany's prestige as a rising power. The result was an arms race that turned into a giant powder keg, which would inevitably explode with the right spark.

Either way, the full implications of all these changes were not really appreciated until it was too late. It's not that people completely had their heads up their asses, mind you. The officers of 1900-14 had taken note of developments in the Boer War and the conflicts in China. Otto von Bismarck was smart enough to see that Europe was a powder keg, and the dreadnought arms race was a clear sign of things being unsettled. Some ideas such as armoured combat land vehicles had been speculated on by the likes of [[H.G. Wells]], and there was some experimentation with armoured cars and things that might evolve into tanks during the first years of the 20th century. Even so, the scope of the shift was underappreciated, especially since there were still plenty of conservative voices in prominent places (both in the military and government) who'd downplay or ignore new technological developments and until things were tested they'd often be seen as voices of moderation against radicals and doomsayers with zero practical experience. Their disillusionment would be complete, bloody, and brutal.

*<small><sup>1</sup>The Taiping Rebellion (not to be confused with the Boxer Rebellion) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.</small>
*<small><sup>2</sup>There was also The War of The Triple Alliance (1865-70), in which Paraguay under López decided to Fight half of South America all at once and ended up getting 9 in 10 Paraguan men killed as well as a decent chunk of the women and kids after López tried to use them as soldiers, which kinda spooked Uruguay and Venezuela but Brazil didn't give a rat's ass and just kept shooting. Again it was fairly localized and South America was fairly underdeveloped, though the simple bloody mindedness of the war was an ominous foreboding of what was to come.</small>

==The First World War==
[[File:Trench warfare great war.jpg|thumb|right|Over the top, lads (sorry, no joke on this one)]]
{{topquote|The War That Will End War.|[[H. G. Wells]], 1914 (spoiler alert, [[fail|it was not]])}}

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it. The abbreviation M.A.I.N is used to refer to the big four reasons it started: Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism.

===Militarism===
Militarism on its own resulted partially from the romanticizing of knights and chivalry, and the idea that serving in the military to conquer colonies for the homeland served to make the state better as a whole. And of course the best way to conquer stuff and then to protect the stuff you'd conquered was to have better weapons and soldiers than the other guys. While most major nations participated in the rise of militarization to some degree, Germany was the keystone of the movement, as its progenitor Prussia was oftentimes called "an army with its own state". This had some factual basis, given that Prussia was born from the Teutonic Crusader State, and its military aristocracy continued to define German policy and culture well into the 20th century.

The veritable arms race in the late 1800s was meant to force peace, resulting in the development of semiautomatic pistols, advanced artillery, increasingly advanced warships, automatic firearms, and a slew of military technological innovations designed to increase the killing power of an individual soldier or unit. Most wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were colonial conflicts waged against low-tech indigenous populations or countries with shitty militaries (the Anglo-Zulu War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War) and as a result were laughably one-sided. This resulted in a general myth that war was an adventure where you got to go kill a bunch of dumb people who needed to understand that your country was better than theirs. It hadn't occurred to the top brass, or anyone else, that if the other guy has the same weapons you do, it isn't nearly as fun; this in spite of warnings from colonial veterans that such a slaughter is inevitable, especially under the old Napoleonic tactics that Europe was still using.

One thing that we'll discuss later is the dreadnought battleship, which radically altered the idea of naval warfare and made everything before them obsolete. A nation's prestige was tied to how many battleships it had, so literally everyone and their dog who could afford one was trying to get their hands on them.

===Alliances===
To prevent one country from getting too much power and hopefully prevent war through mutually assured destruction, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which ultimately coalesced into two pacts: the Triple Entente (France, Britain (kind of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria), with the United States being free to do whatever the fuck it wanted in the Americas and eastern Pacific sans Canada. The Ottoman Empire was desperately trying to stave off its imminent and inevitable collapse, and the chaos in the Balkans would eventually lead them to try and join the Central Powers.

Japan was a special case. It had an alliance with Britain to act as a sort of "check" against the Russians and their Pacific ambitions, while also serving as an valuable ally against the German Pacific colonies. The benefit was also that Russia could act as an ally against the Japanese if they ever started looking towards Australia without Parliament's permission.

Serbia's national sovereignty was guaranteed by France and Russia, and Belgium received a guarantee from Britain that they'd intervene if Germany tried to use them to just waltz into France and thereby threaten Britain. Meanwhile Italy was in theory allied to the Germans and Austrian-Hungarians, but had stuff in Austria-Hungary that they wouldn't [[Blood Ravens|feel too bad about stealing]]. [[Tzeentch|If this all sounds very convoluted, welcome to the late 1800s.]]

===Imperialism===
One of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire, or Imperialism. During the 18th and 19th centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. This all kicked off back when Spain discovered the New World and became very wealthy as a result; as stated on the [[Renaissance]] page, the other nations of Europe ''realllly'' didn't want to live under the Hapsburgs' hegemony and started competing to build their own empires. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France in order to fuel their industry and economy back home at the expense of the natives. The treatment of the indigenous population varied based on whichever European power happened to dominate a particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off; one could argue that at least that stopped the chattel slavery that was endemic to the region until the colonization, but suffice to say the natives would likely think that the chattel slavery was preferable. For a while, the competition was "merely" a case of rivalry, as each nation generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly, barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire, until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck.

The unification of Germany triggered a renewed colonial rush across the globe. Germany, having come late to the game, was determined to play catch-up, even though all of the really desirable territory in Africa and Asia was already claimed. Nevertheless, they still managed to take possession of a bunch of African territories in modern day Namibia and gained a number of island colonies in the Pacific. This ultimately led to everyone starting to side-eye each others' colonies for various reasons. Italy, for example, aspired to be master of the Mediterranean Sea, while Britain had a historical and economic/political reputation to uphold as protector of the waves with their navy, the so-called "Pax Britannica". Remember that, it'll be important.

Meanwhile Austria-Hungary wanted Balkan territories, and Germany and Japan were latecomers who wanted in on the pie. Even the Americans dipped their hand into it by taking Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. Needless to say there were plenty of instances where each empire had a vested interest in stealing territory away from each other for their own political and economic gains.

===Nationalism===
Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who looked at Britain with barely restrained jealousy and decided that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog of Europe. Enter the idea of Nationalism, a political theory that roughly states that loyalty to the state trumps all other loyalties, and that there is no higher expression of loyalty to the state than making it better than all the other states. Combine this with borderline unrestrained capitalism and social Darwinism, and you have a toxic brew of ideas: that your country "must" be better than other countries, cooperation is purely for the benefit of countering rivals and earning prestige, and diplomacy, global politics, and economics are zero-sum games that you have to win. Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism. Patriotism is a love for one's country, while nationalism is a determination to make one's country better than others even at the expense of those other countries.

Remember how we mentioned that Pax Britannica and the technological innovations will come up again later? These two, combined with nationalism, were a special point of concern for Britain. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had become the enforcer of the peace on the world's seas and the guarantor of Britain's world-spanning empire. The United Kingdom invested colossal amounts of time and money into building a world-beating fleet, equipped with the latest naval technology and manned by a highly trained pool of professional officers and sailors. They produced one of the world's first ironclad warships in 1860 and pioneered the use of propeller-driven ships, gun turrets, and torpedoes. By 1889, Britain's determination to hold onto their top-dog status at sea was formally codified as the "two power standard", whereby the Royal Navy was always to be as strong as the number two and three navies in the world. This worked just fine until 1906, when the revolutionary new battleship HMS ''Dreadnought'' was built and launched. With a uniform armament of big guns, turbine engines, and many other technological improvements, ''Dreadnought'' instantly rendered all other battleships in the world obsolete and triggered a worldwide naval arms race as other countries started building their own dreadnoughts.

In this time before the rise of aircraft carriers and submarines, battleships were still the final arbiter of naval power and a potent symbol of national prestige. Any navy that wanted to be taken seriously had to have battleships, but ''Dreadnought'' had set everyone back to square one, including the Royal Navy. Now it was possible for countries that had lacked a battleship navy to catch up with the big players, and it didn't take long for everyone on the planet to get in on the game. Aside from the usual suspects like Britain, Germany, America, Russia, and France, countries like Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were all ordering up dreadnoughts as fast as they could find the money. Wilhelm II was particularly obsessed with having a dreadnought fleet of his own; aside from the boost it would bring to Germany's prestige and military power, he had long been in love with the Royal Navy and dreamed of building a fleet just like it when he became Kaiser. He hadn't even intended to start an arms race, but when Britain saw Germany investing in a fleet that was potentially equal to theirs, they were completely unwilling to risk losing their status as the dominant naval power. Germany wasn't willing to acquiesce either, since they didn't understand why Britain was getting so upset about the whole thing until one British commentator summed up the UK's position as follows: Germany would still be the most powerful country on the continent of Europe with or without a navy, but if the Royal Navy were wiped out, Britain would instantly lose control of its empire and its position as number one superpower in the world.

A further thing to note is that nationalist tensions were starting to weaken the imperial system, as people living in countries that had been subjugated by the great empires started looking around and going "hey, fuck being ruled by a bunch of smelly dickhead foreigners!" While some countries were able to survive these tensions with more or less sensible governments, like England with the House of Commons, more often than not this resulted in outright revolt, which caused the creation of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and a swath of states formerly under the control of an empire that figured they'd be better off ruling themselves. Others were crushed under the Russians, who knew that successful nationalist movements could cause them to face similar issues with Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

The countries that were hardest hit by these successive waves of unrest revolution were none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were creaky, poor, exhausted states in dire need of reform. The solution that was attempted in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep the state from collapsing. The formation of the Dual [[Monarchy]] and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans had the failed Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks coup following the Tanzimat's abolition establishing what was intended to be a constitutional monarch but was really a military dictatorship under the delusionally idealistic and, as would be proven in a few years, seriously incompetent Enver Pasha and his fellows in high command. Others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror and oppression tactics. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the fractious and ethnically diverse Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

===Additional Factors===
Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm was first ''and'' second cousins with Tsar Nicholas of Russia and first cousins with the Tsarina, the King of England, and the queens of Norway, Spain, and Romania, and they all got along about as well as your average pack of siblings.

Another was that when the war started, a [[That Guy|certain someone]] called the United States took a [[A Game of Pretend |totally neutral and not blatantly pro-Entente]] stance by shipping vast amounts of food and materiel to Britain and funding the war via loans to the Entente powers. The massive debt that Britain and France rang up made Wall Street and Washington more and more interested in making sure their investment could be paid back. This along other things would be one of the deciding factors in American involvement in the First World War.

The Franco-Prussian War was also a sore spot for France, who were not only afraid of German encroachment, but determined to get revenge for what they had done to them. This not only contributed to France's bloody-minded determination not to quit fighting, but also influenced the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

As far as significant developments, probably one of the biggest was Wilhelm II sacking Otto von Bismarck for a yes-man. Unlike Wilhelm, Bismarck was smart enough to understand that Germany's rise was a substantial shake-up of the existing European order, and had spent years doing his best to establish Germany's strength and prestige without causing alarm to the other powers. The first Kaiser, Wilhelm I. understood this, as did his son Friedrich III. (who died 90 days into office from cancer), but Wilhelm II wanted to prove his country was better (or more to the point, he wanted to prove that ''he'' was better, as he had longstanding insecurity due to a birth defect in his left arm - a big drawback in an overtly militarized society where physical prowess was the gold standard of manliness). So he sacked probably the smartest man in the entire goddamn government because he wasn't retarded enough to create a [[Horus Heresy|massive war that would fuck everyone over.]] Although there is a point to be made that Bismarck isolated himself in interior politics, as much of his efforts to keep the country stable consisted of suppressing the quickly growing movement of Socialists and alienating the otherwise staunchly conservative Catholics and in both efforts, he failed miserably (The culture war against the Catholics drew the ire of the Pope and the repressions against the workers movement and the Social Democratic Party SPD failed miserably)

===The Straw that Broke Europe's Back===
The spark that detonated the Balkans came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Young Bosnia movement, which was itself under the influence of the Black Hand, an infamous Serbian nationalist organization. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (then the biggest independent Slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When [[Just as Planned|the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli]] and declared war on Serbia. This was the first in a line of dominoes. In response, [[Not as planned|Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany]]. Germany would then invade neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict... at least on paper. In reality, after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France, England had acquired a near-monopoly on overseas trade and undisputed control of the seas, and it would have been perfectly content to let the continental powers beat the shit out of each other without getting involved...until Germany started churning out dreadnoughts of its own. As mentioned, the dreadnought arms race meant that Germany was threatening England's complete naval domination and thus the lifeblood of its empire. A frightened and suspicious Britain was champing at the bit for a throwdown, and Belgium was just the perfect excuse to get involved.

The internationalization of the conflict and the various ethnicities that the colonial empires of Europe press-ganged into service had some downright comical results, like an Indian battalion fighting in East Africa against German-led Askari tribesmen and Maori soldiers killing Turks at Gallipoli, all because because a Serbian shot an Austrian in Bosnia.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, the outbreak of diseases such as the Spanish flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. An entire generation of Europe's young men was destroyed as a result (commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

===Hell on Earth===
{{topquote|European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches.|Virginia Postrel}}

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority/superior fighting spirit, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilian population, at least for a while, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. As the war ground on, morale became so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of mass destruction. Tanks made their debut in this war, slowly rumbling through no-man's-land like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing out punishing amounts of firepower themselves, only to break down in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. Airplanes first saw use in a combat role here, and they would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow influence the negotiations in their countries' favor. The fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM, where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

===Campaigns===
====Western Europe====
{{topquote|What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?<br>— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.<br>Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle<br>Can patter out their hasty orisons.<br>No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;<br>Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—<br>The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells<br>And bugles calling for them from sad shires.|Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"}}

Of all the fronts in WWI, Western Europe is the one that's been most documented and seared into the popular consciousness. It cut through Belgium and France all the way down to Switzerland. When Italy joined the Allies, the front was extended to across the Italo-Austrian border. Germany's Schlieffen Plan was intended to be used to quickly deal with France, and once France was broken troops could be diverted to support the Eastern Front. This didn't come to pass as diplomatic pressure caused troops to be diverted East, preventing their use in the Schlieffen Plan and resulting in the offensive against France stalling out short of its goal of capturing Paris. As neither side had a real advantage over the other, they were forced to dig in for the long haul, creating the conditions for trench warfare, the ugliest and most iconic aspect of WWI. This is where all the stereotypical images of the war originated: endless lines of trenches, forests and fields reduced to blasted, muddy moonscapes, barbed wire and rotting corpses everywhere, clouds of mustard gas, and soldiers armed with bolt-action rifles and bayonets charging into no-man's-land to be slaughtered in the thousands by machine guns and artillery.

The front lines would effectively remain static throughout the war, though both sides made attempts to break the stalemate and resume a true offensive. The Entente attempted breakthroughs at the Battles of the Somme and Ypres, both of which ended in massive casualties for minimal gains. The British army suffered over 57,000 killed, wounded, and missing on the first day of the Somme, which is still the worst casualty rate in its history. Ypres was a series of battles fought in the same general area, collectively becoming known as the First through Fifth Battles of Ypres. Second Ypres saw the Germans' first mass deployment of chemical weapons, while Third Ypres, aka Passchendaele, resulted in somewhere between 400,000-800,000 casualties on both sides. Verdun was a 1916 attempt to knock France out of the war by attacking the fortified city of Verdun, a keystone of France's defensive line. The idea was to grind the French army down through sheer attrition; it backfired and wound up costing the Germans almost as many troops as it did the French (~336,000 German vs. ~379,000 French). Meanwhile, the Spring Offensive of 1918 was a last-ditch attempt to win the war after the Russian capitulation and before the Americans could show up in sufficient numbers to turn the tide. Some indicator of how well this was going to go came from Ludendorff himself, who declared that all the German army had to do was punch a hole in the Allied lines and they'd somehow just win from there.

When Italy joined the fight, basically nothing changed except that the Austro-Hungarians now had to defend their western border in addition to their south and east. The only other significant nation to join the Allies in western Europe was Portugal, who were wooed by promises of protection for their colonial empire in Africa in exchange for joining the Entente.

====Eastern Europe====
Eastern Europe receives comparatively little study compared to the Western Front, mainly because records from that time weren't well preserved or were destroyed during the chaos of the Russian Revolution. While just as bloody in some instances, it offered many more opportunities for maneuver warfare than was afforded on the Western Front. An attack by the Russians on East Prussia went terribly, but just as France hoped, it forced the Germans to divert men away from France and the Schlieffen Plan and into the Eastern Front. This slow advance by the Central Powers in the east would only be halted and reversed in 1916 by the Brusilov Offensive, a brutal assault wherein the Russians shoved the Austro-Hungarians back into their homeland.

This was too much at too high a cost, because mass desertions, poor battlefield performance, inadequate food supply and widespread dissatisfaction with the ruling aristocracy along with everything else wrong with the Russian empire saw the country basically collapse. Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate, after which he and his family were eventually murdered by the Bolsheviks, and a provisional government was set up. This government proceeded to try an attack against Austria-Hungary with horrific results, stoking further unrest. This was eventually followed by the November 1917 Russian Revolution that brought in Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks, who would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The peace agreement between Germany and Russia saw the latter have a ton of territory taken from them in March, which eventually led to the formation of the Baltic nations, Poland, and Ukraine, among others. Finland also broke away during the chaos of the revolution, and with much bigger problems on their plate, the Russians kinda just let it happen.

Meanwhile, Serbia would hold out until 1915 against Austria-Hungary, until being overrun after Bulgaria declared for the Central Powers and helped chase the Serbs into Greece. Montenegro followed a few months later in 1916. Greece eventually forced their king to abdicate and declared for the Entente in 1917. The Bulgarians were forced into an armistice after the defeat at Dobro-Pole.

Romania joined the war after seeing the debacle of the Brusilov Offensive, thinking they could join in on the tail-end and steal some land from a couple of dying empires. They were promptly disabused of this notion after they got their shit kicked in by Bulgaria, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, and their army took up a supporting role alongside the Russians until the Bolshevik revolution forced them to sign an armistice. In the end they still managed to increase their territories as a result of their participation in the conflict, so they got what they'd wanted even if it hadn't gone exactly as planned.

====Ottoman Empire====
When the guns of August started blasting, the Ottoman Empire was in the final stages of collapse. A series of military defeats throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had led to the Tanzimat period of the 19th century, which had bought the empire some time thanks to extensive reforms that had taken place, but there was increasing unrest in the Balkans and elsewhere. Though the Turks suppressed several nationalist uprisings, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 forced them to grant independence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, while Austria-Hungary walked in and took Bosnia-Herzegovina and Britain gained ''de facto'' control of Cyprus and Egypt. The empire's last throw of the dice came with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a ''coup d'etat'' that attempted to reform the empire into a democratic state by restoring its constitution and establishing an electoral system. The Italo-Turkish War in 1911 cost the Empire its North African territories and the Dodecanese, while the First Balkan War the following year cost it almost all its territories in the Balkans.

When the war broke out, the Ottomans officially declared neutrality at first, though they talked to both sides to see what they might get out of joining either one. They ultimately came down on the German side after being offered territorial concessions and a guarantee of defense against Russia, along with the Germans essentially forcing the issue by sending a battlecruiser and light cruiser through the Dardanelles strait to Constantinople. Turkey bought the ships and officially commissioned them into their navy, only for the Germans to run off and start bombarding Russia's Black Sea ports without formal authorization from the Turkish government.

Turkey's most well-known contribution to World War I was its defense of the Dardanelles, the strait which allows passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They had closed the strait to all Allied shipping not long after entering the war. This inflicted a crippling blow to Russia's economy, which depended on grain exports from the Crimea and elsewhere on the Black Sea coast. The British made several attempts to capture the strait, which would let them put ships into the Black Sea, threaten Constantinople directly, and reopen Russia's lifeline. Several purely naval efforts to smash the forts and gun positions defending the strait failed, after which Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a landing at the Gallipoli peninsula. A protracted and bloody campaign ensued which saw Australian and New Zealander troops (the famed ANZACs) being fed into the grinder while the Turks more than held their own (no thanks to high command, big thanks to then Colonel Mustafa Kemal). The British ultimately conceded defeat and withdrew their troops, and the Dardanelles remained closed for the rest of the war. The campaign became an emotional flashpoint for Australia and New Zealand, who (not inaccurately) viewed it as a senseless sacrifice of their best young men by their colonial overlords, and was part of the reason they began pushing for greater autonomy and eventually independence after the war. The failure also got Churchill fired from the Admiralty, which most people at the time figured was the end of his career. Perhaps the biggest consequence of this was the shattering of the notion of colonial invincibility, which officially ignited the spark of anti-colonialism across the globe.

Another major front for the Ottomans was the Mesopotamian campaign, which saw them fighting the British in the Middle East. Though the empire did well for the first two years, the Arab Revolt of 1916-1917, led by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Faisal bin Al-Hussein, saw Arabic irregulars waging a guerrilla war against the Ottomans that tied down great numbers of troops and ultimately led to their defeat in the theater. Britain fucked up here as well; to secure Arabic support for the revolt, they had promised to back the creation of a unified Arab state, which they would recognize after the war. They promptly reneged on that deal once the war was over, instead signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France. The agreement haphazardly carved the Middle East into a bunch of mandate territories, all of whom had and still have beef with each other for various reasons. It is still the cause of widespread resentment in the region to this day.

After the war had really gotten rolling, the Ottomans also decided they might as well do some war crimes while they were at it and promptly committed genocides against the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. [[/pol/|Turkey claimed at the time, and still insists today, that the Armenian genocide in particular was not a genocide, that the Armenians were resettled for totally legitimate military reasons, and that the Armenians were actually the ones doing the genociding, so they totally had it coming, etc etc]]. Bringing this up around anyone from Turkey is a ''really'' good way to start a fight; Turkey's founding myths rest on the notion that the genocide never happened, so the modern Turkish government is quick to banhammer any kind of pop culture that even mentions it. The average citizen either doesn't care or if educated sees any and all actions taken as desperate survival measures against colonization (not an unfair concern if one looks at Africa or India). The indisputable Turkish hero of the war and founder of the modern nation state, Mustafa Kemal, fighting at Gallipoli while the whole mess that was Anatolia at the time was taking place while Enver Pasha was in the lap of luxury pretending to be a soldier also makes sure that the modern republic is fiercely held as being wholly separate so even modernists won't agree with Western historians on this matter.

====Africa====
Before the war, most of the colonial powers seemed to agree that if a war ever started, Africa should be left out of it. The risk of breaking the grasp of the metropoli over the colonies was too great, and if the colonial powers kicked each other to the curb in Africa, it could give the natives ideas about declaring independence, especially if they were armed and trained for war. The Conference of Berlin had already stated decades ago that any war between colonial powers would set the colonies aside as neutral parties. Of course, once the war started, all the high-minded rhetoric went down the drain; the Entente saw the German colonies as easy pickings, isolated and surrounded as they were by the much bigger colonial holdings of the British, the French, and the Portuguese. Thus, Germany had lost control over most of its colonies by 1916, since it couldn't really afford to divert resources to the colonies (and the British Navy would have intercepted them anyway). In German East Africa, however, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck decided he wasn't going to let any damned Limeys roll over on him, so he rallied his small force of native askaris and German officers and led a notably successful campaign of guerrilla/mobile warfare against the British colonial troops. They managed to hold out against British, Belgian, and Portuguese armies many times their size (hell, by the time he learned Germany had lost the war, [[awesome|he was invading British territory]]).

As an equally badass postscript, when the German government finally agreed to award the askaris back pay several decades later, most of the survivors had lost their uniforms and certificates of service. To prove that they had served under von Lettow-Vorbeck, each man who came forth was handed a broom and ordered in German to execute the manual of arms. [[Awesome|Every one of them remembered their training]].

====Pacific====
Easily the quietest theater of the war. Mostly just Japan taking over Germany's scattered Pacific colonies. There were a few minor naval engagements between the German Far East Squadron and the Royal Navy and some attacks by German commerce raiders, but overall it was pretty sparse compared to what would happen in the sequel. The biggest consequence was that the Chinese had joined the Allied Powers, hoping to show solidarity with them and get some of their land back from at least one of the imperial powers that had been carving them up like Peking duck for the last century, so they were understandably pissed when Japan was awarded those German territories instead. Japan was also given a bunch of other German island colonies scattered across the western Pacific, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused all three powers to start side-eyeing each other.

===Aftermath===
The consequences of WWI cannot be understated. This four-year-long international bloodletting completely destroyed the Eurocentric world order that had persisted since the 1500s, reduced all European powers except Russia from being superpowers in their own right to second-rank states, and began the end of the age of (overt) imperialism for good. The amount of money spent on this war was enormous; Britain went from the world's biggest lender to its biggest debtor, having spent a treasury accumulated over the course of 300 years of colonial British and English history in just four years. France saw its industrial and agricultural heartlands in the northeast reduced to a shell-pocked, poisonous wasteland that is ''to this day'' unusable and dangerous from all the unexploded ordnance buried in the fields and forests. Germany had gone from its familiar Prussian semi-feudal social order to a constitutional republic with nothing to fill the social void that was left when the old Imperial elites just fucked off elsewhere and left it to the Social Democrats and Liberals to try and clean up the mess they had created. Russia was transformed into the Soviet Union and could only compensate for the extreme loss of people and infrastructure by installing a tyrannical regime and condemning millions of its own people to death in forced labour camps and engineered famines. And that's just in Europe. In the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France haphazardly carved the region up into a bunch of countries and territories with no regard ([[Marines Malevolent|or intentional disregard]]) for the cultural mixup of the lands they took from the Ottomans. This ended up creating some of the most vicious and long-lasting ethnic conflicts in history, most of which are still going on to this day, with the Iraq-Iran, Israeli-Palestinian and in general Sunni-Shi'a conflict and the Turkish-Kurdish war (of which the latter's first uprising was explicitly aided by the British) being particularly noteworthy examples. The latter one in particular is only on the way out more than one hundred and ten years later when military crackdown and drones made terrorism unviable (and Turkish Kurds realizing that living in Turkey as opposed to a nonviable independent state surrounded by hostile powers, or worse, Syria or Iraq, wasn't so bad after all). And of course all of these people ended up nursing a profound grudge against the West that would only get worse when they found themselves relegated to being a mere prize for the Soviets and the Western bloc to compete over during the Cold War. This too would end up coming back to haunt everyone involved nearly a century later. Japan gained a bunch of Pacific territory taken from the Germans, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused them to start thinking more seriously about flexing their own imperialist muscles in the region. Moreover, Japan's vocal dissatisfaction with how they were treated by the rest of the Allies after the war caused a negative feedback loop of hostility and distrust between them and the Western powers, which had direct and dire consequences in the next war.

===The Easter Rising===
Ever since they'd been incorporated into Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, Ireland hadn't been particularly happy under British rule. Things like the abolition of their parliament, the Great Potato Famine, the oppression of Irish Catholics, and the British army's heavy-handed treatment of anyone who got too unruly had caused younger Irish nationalists to conclude that nothing was going to get done unless they did it with violence. Just before the outbreak of the war, Britain had actually passed an act to grant the Irish home rule, but with Europe turning into a mosh pit, the act was suspended for a year, and then for two more periods of six months each as the war dragged on. At this point, several leaders of the nationalist Irish Republican Brotherhood decided that enough was enough and began planning an armed uprising during Easter Week 1916 to break Ireland free from the UK, even reaching out to the Germans for support. The rest of the IRB didn't think it was such a good idea and the Germans refused their initial suggestion to send a landing force, instead offering to send them some weapons and ammunition. The leaders who were planning the revolt didn't tell their foot soldiers in the Irish Volunteers until the last minute what was going on, and when the Royal Navy seized the German arms shipment, one of the less belligerent IRB leaders immediately decided to call the whole thing off. As a result, what was supposed to be a nationwide uprising was confined almost entirely to Dublin. The first day went pretty well, with the rebels taking control of the city and establishing the foundation of a government. [[Fail|Then the British army showed up with artillery and gunboats and started blasting them to shit]]. The uprising was suppressed by the end of the week, and the ringleaders were tried in military courts and executed. The executions and the brutal reprisals leveled by the British army, along with the murders of a bunch of unarmed civilians during the Rising, stoked public opinion in Ireland against the British and led to the rise of the nationalist party Sinn Fein, ultimately laying the grounds for the Irish War of Independence, the creation of the Irish Free State, and full independence in 1949.

===The Punitive Expedition===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. His actual reasons for this are unclear, but seizing supplies and/or trying to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was pretty small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

===The Warlord Era===
Around the same time, after the Boxer Rebellion failed to remove the Europeans from China, it became clear that Imperial China's days were over. After the forced abdication of the Qing Emperor, attempts to create a modern Chinese Republic quickly collapsed as regional warlords split the country among themselves, each intent on unifying China with themselves as its leader. Much like the Three Kingdoms period way back in early China, much of the military and political conflict was characterized by long, drawn-out border skirmishes with the occasional big battle, massive conscript armies, backstabbing, and leaders who were able to hold onto power so long as they had their army's loyalty. Due to an arms embargo and limited domestic manufacturing, industrialized warfare played a very limited role in the early part of the Warlord era; cavalry and bayonet charges were still viable, as very few warlords could afford the artillery and machine guns needed to make them obsolete. However, the eventual intervention of the Japanese eventually shifted the conflict away from a domestic dispute into a fight for China's survival against a technologically superior force, as covered in more detail below.

===The Empire of the Rising Sun===
Japan began emerging as something of the world power a few decades before the war. In 1854, the Japanese were peacefully telling foreigners to stay the fuck out of their country (a policy which hasn't really changed much to this day, only this time they are using things called "laws" instead of [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katanas]]) when suddenly this funny guy named Matthew Perry shows up with some warships. His purpose was to open Japan for business with the West, particularly America. Now contrary to many countries of the period that were forced to open trade at gunpoint, Japan was smart enough to realize that if they did not modernize, they'd be made someone else's bitch. This fate was something that the Japanese have loathed and regularly tried to avoid for their entire history. So after a brief civil war that may or may not have involved Tom Cruise, the Meiji dynasty was established. This began a period of rapid military, economic, and cultural expansion in Japan. Baseball is a popular sport in Japan because Japan took great early influence from the United States. They modeled themselves on Britain, especially its notions of empire, conquest, and spheres of influence; for quite a while, all orders in the Imperial Japanese Navy were given in English, not Japanese. Eventually, this led the Japanese into disagreements with the Russians over Manchurian China and the Kuril Islands. This was the cause of the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 shocked the dominant European powers because the Japanese had managed to defeat the supposedly superior Russians (though the fact of the matter was that both sides blundered hard and the weebs won because the other side was MUCH more incompetent and further from their supply lines - the Russian armada sent from the Baltic Sea to Japan suffered multiple breakdowns and almost started a war with Britain by firing on a British fishing fleet because they thought it was the Japanese). Japan was a member of the Triple Entente and as such seized some German islands in Asia, sent a small fleet into the Mediterranean to escort naval convoys and participated in an expedition alongside the US and European countries in Siberia after the revolution in Russia, but the main political activity was focused on exerting an ever increasing influence on China. After the war, Japan was awarded a permanent seat in the League of Nations, most of Germany's possessions in the Pacific, and recognition as a 'great power', but their proposal to be recognized as equals race-wise was rejected. This caused alienation from the Western powers, which in turn would partially contribute to [[RAGE|increased nationalism and militarism]] down the line.

==Side Note: The Shackleton Expedition and the End of the Age of Heroes==
Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic voyage and the perils they faced ending with the miraculous survival of all but three members and the ship's cat after incredible heroism occurred during the First World War in its entirety. Shackleton was sure that the war wouldn't last more than a few months after last hearing that Russia had mobilized and that there were some minor German victories. So what happened to the great hero and his crew of champions? They returned from their epic expedition the middle of 1916. When Shackleton asked the governor of South Georgia Island when the war had ended, the reply was that millions were dying, that Europe was mad, and that the World was mad. Expecting a well deserved hero's welcome, Shackleton and his men found abject, mute horror instead. Most of them volunteered to serve in minesweepers or on the front, and several were killed in action. Shackleton even demanded a frontline position despite his severe heart condition exacerbated by the nightmare he went through, though they resisted until the Allied intervention in the Arctic front of the Russian Civil War, where he worked until the Bolsheviks took that part and the war shifted to the Caucasus and when that was done through a deal with Turkish revolutionaries (more on that below) the chase to the Pacific across Asia. Shackleton himself passed away due to heart complications in 1922, perhaps the last larger than life hero before the world woke up to gritty reality.

==The Interwar Period==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919, being spot on}}
Believing that the world could not endure another such war, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted to set the groundwork for long-term peace between whites and "white equivalents"(Wilson was a massively racist cunt); he set forth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Unfortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (it was basically an even shittier proto-United Nations, in that at least the UN specialist agencies do important global coordination work). Most significantly, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in Congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European war.

Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge. Of note also was Wilson's hyper nationalism to the point he believed if everywhere was just like America it would be paradise on Earth, ironically being just as stubborn about forcing democracies and decolonisation as his allies were against the League despite the people involved not knowing a single thing about any of this stuff and nations (like Germany) not being too hot on democracies anyway leading to widespread political instability to the point some say (whether true or not) every issue of the modern day can somehow be traced back to this guy. He was also a huge dick on a personal level as well, the man was an exceptionally vile racist in a time when being racist was the norm. Got crippled by a stroke which precluded him from really doing anything mid-1919 onwards, killed his plans for reelection to a third term, then straight up killed him after his term was over.

Near the end of the First World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. [[Nurgle|The Spanish Flu]], which got its name because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war/didn't actively suppress the news of the epidemic, spread rapidly and killed millions thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various conflicts continued at the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French colonial forces, Islamists loyal to the Ottoman Government and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime.

The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarchy and the caliphate a year after the end of the monarchy and the Treaty of Lausanne, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing, with the only real big scare being the Bosphorus Straits affair with the Soviets, that was resolved through the Montreaux Convention in the 1930s. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

Compare this to America, which was having some of its best years. The aftermath of WWI and the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty had seen Britain concede that it could no longer maintain the two-power standard, since: 1. it couldn't afford to keep spending that kind of money and 2. this would have required the Royal Navy to compete with the US Navy, which was a friend and ally as opposed to a potential threat. As a result, the US Navy managed to achieve parity with the Royal Navy fairly quickly during the interwar period. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. Presidents Harding and Coolidge lead the country into great economic growth, to the point that most of the world would look to the NYSE as an indicator of economic health. See, unlike the European powers, it hadn't seen the deaths of millions of young men, been forced to reorient itself to the demands of a continental total war, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that happen and was taken over by communists after a civil war like Russia (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war, meaning that the country was flush with cash.

Coolidge would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). [[FAIL|Then in October of 1929 the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.]], officially earning Hoover a place as one of the worst presidents in American history.

There had been a series of stock market crashes in the US every decade or so during the the 19th century, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment becoming commonplace, loans for buying stock with, a lot of scams and the limits of the real economy which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery.

It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle-scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now tottering under the weight of an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. It culminated in a French occupation of some of the last profitable land left in Germany, the Ruhr valley, and eventually lead to a renegotiation of the payments that would be more generous to the German economy. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across whole states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things didn't seem to be working and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008, after New Deal-era financial regulations were pulled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Italy ===
See [[Fascist Italy]]. Shortly put though, as the Italians are not entirely to blame, this guy named Mussolini created a new ideology that seemed pretty snazzy, called Fascism<sup>1</sup>, that combined big government and ultra-nationalist militarism into another toxic ideology that advocated the strength and growth of the state. Italian Fascism is found in a manifesto of sorts written by Giovanni Gentile in the seminal work "The Doctrine of Fascism" for those interested in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_98uT1IZs&t=1s&ab_channel=RyanChapman|further research]. He also ruled for far longer than Hitler did, taking over as "Prime Minister" in 1922 until his removal in 1943.

The Italians conquered Ethiopia to reclaim their national honor after getting wrecked by them, and had a general foreign policy of attempting to promote international fascism. By which of course the end result would be an Italian sphere of influence. This is represented in HOI4 by the Albania tree, the attempts at Turkish influence, and their intervention in the Spanish Civil War along with the Germans. For all intents and purposes, Mussolini seemed very genuine in his intent to promote Fascism across the globe to not only promote Italian interests but to correct the "failures of liberalism" and counter those filthy Communists<sup>2</sup>. It also helps that the leader of such a movement could become wealthy and powerful as a result.

<small><sup>1</sup>Fascism with a capital "F" refers specifically to Italian fascism. With a little "f", it is a noun describing a broad ideology. [[Tzeentch|Nazism is fascist, but not "Fascist".]] [[What|Savvy?]]</small>

<small><sup>2</sup>Fascism was a reaction against the Russian Revolution and the chaos of post-war Italy. Mussolini came to power by leading a bunch of nationalist thugs that beat up Socialists and Communists in Northern Italy and eventually the Italian King and the old-school conservatives made him Prime Minister as he seemed to be effective against them.</small>

===Rise of Authoritarians: Germany===
In Germany, the economic and political failures of the Weimar Republic soured people on the whole idea of democracy, which contributed to the rise of authoritarian parties on the left like the Communist KPD, which in turn led to the creation of the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party or NSDAP) party to counter them (possibly with help from other Western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations Germany was forced to pay to the rest of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, which renegotiated or not, still put a perceived blame for the war unjustly upon them along with a variety of other complicated things that can be blamed on the [[Nazi|Nazis]]. Rounding it off was the ''Dolchstosslegende'', or "stab-in-the-back-myth", that was concocted by butthurt imperial generals like Ludendorff and Hindenburg in order to shift the blame for Germany's defeat to the Social Democrats or the [[What|historic enemy of Germany, the Jews.]]

The concurrent deeply authoritarian political culture of many German institutions as well as reactionary and monarchist industrialists like Krupp, who all backed Hitler and nationalist and antisemitic parties similar to the NSDAP (like the DNVP) and the lack of people actually willing to give a damn about the Republic itself led to the erosion of the few democratic principles left at this point. From 1930 onward, Hindenburg, who was elected President as the candidate of a coalition of nationalist and conservative parties, reigned over Germany in a dictatorial manner and named Hitler as Chancellor and head of government in January 1933, after two governments under the centrist-conservative Party Zentrum and the Nationalist DNVP failed to stabilize the economy. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up for war, and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmament were certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France after the bloodbath of the Western Front.

To their credit, in the mid '30s the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between completing the Autobahn, hosting the Olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. When the communists tried to launch a revolution in Spain, Germany and Italy sent weapons and eventually troops to curbstomp them and test out their new toys on people with wrong opinions, while Britain looked the other way and pretended not to notice that Germany suddenly had hundreds of tanks that they were legally not supposed to have, and that France and the Soviets were doing the same thing with the communist revolutionaries. So nobody was too concerned when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in the border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Then shit started to get real.

In 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, which was a direct violation of both treaties. Britain and France were concerned, but neither country was ready to go to war again, so they let it slide. Hitler took this as confirmation that they wouldn't do shit to stop him and ramped up his plans for rearmament and conquest. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria more or less peacefully, then walked into Czechoslovakia and took the Sudetenland, home to 3 million ethnic Germans. The rest of the continent was getting increasingly worried, but Hitler super-duper promised that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial acquisition, cross his heart and hope to die. Britain and France were desperate to avoid war, and Hungary and Poland also wanted some of Czechoslovakia's turf, so together they strong-armed Czechoslovakia into signing the Munich Agreement, officially ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed that the Agreement was "peace for our time" when he came home from the negotiations on 30 September 1938. A pissed-off Winston Churchill correctly predicted that Hitler wasn't going to stop at the Sudetenland, and was proven right when Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then started side-eyeing Poland and the former German territories it now controlled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Japan===
In the 19th century the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would come by and stomp all over them like they did China and Southeast Asia. During the Tokugawa period, military technology had basically stagnated as there were no pressing internal or external threats that required [[Dakka|shootier guns]] or better tactics to sort out. There was much anxiety in the Tokugawa Shogunate about this (and even a limited attempt at army modernization by at least one Japanese domain) but things came to a head in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour and ended two centuries of isolation at cannon-point. The end of the Sakoku and bombardments by US and Royal Navy ships drove the necessity of modernization home. The Shogunate bought foreign guns and ships, lifted restrictions on shipbuilding and sent diplomatic missions abroad, but the pace of modernization and Westernization really picked up after the Meiji Restoration. By 1914 Japan had a solid public education system and set of universities, a well-developed rail network, a respectable industrial base and an army and navy which had beaten the Russian Empire. In the Great War they drove the German Empire out of the Pacific. Japan had arrived on the world stage, but despite that they were still concerned about the West and its influence, what with Britain and France being two of the largest and most acquisitive colonial powers on Earth. The Japanese saw what had happened to their neighbors and wanted no part of it. Combine this with a historic ''extreme'' hard on for cultural and political independence that can still be observed to this very day, and you start to get the anxiety faced by Imperial Japan.

Even so while the Meiji Restoration was successful in its general goals, it had its faults. It did end the Tokugawa class system and introduced a parliament, but it was still largely a system set up for the benefit of a small number of well connected oligarchs. The franchise was limited to only 1% of the population, with the prominent lordlings and industrialists who'd backed the Emperor in the Boshin War and their kids being disproportionately prominent in Japanese society. There would be considerable push for reform after the Great War (in particular there was universal male suffrage in 1925), but there would also be strong pushback by conservatives and militarist ultranationalists, especially after a huge earthquake devastated Tokyo in 1926 and the Great Depression came along to wallop the Japanese economy. Unlike their later partners in the Axis, there was no Japanese Hitler or Mussolini figure who masterminded and led a movement which came to dictate authority. Instead Japan had a collection of right-wing cranks and extremists and a military which was off the chain. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were loyal only to the Emperor (and in practice they just did whatever they wanted and asked the Emperor for permission after the fact) and the Diet had very little power over them at the best of times. Technically the Meiji Parliament continued to putter on, but from 1931-45 it was marginalized and subverted. Whenever prominent liberals and socialists who oppose rampant militarism get ganked by radical thugs who are pardoned by judges who are either on board with the militarists or afraid that they'll get ganked themselves, the power and influence of said nationalist militarists will steadily grow until they can more or less do as they please, specifically getting their imperialism on.

Even though the Japanese had managed to modernize rapidly in a short span of time and kicked the shit out of the Russians, they were still often seen as inferiors by white people, [[Imperial Japanese Equipment|"yellow monkeys who could only copy what white folk invented" and other such nonsense]]. Some people like Wilhelm II and some nativist shitheads in the US, Canada and Australia saw the Japanese and East Asians in general as still being lesser, but still capable enough to be a threat ("The Yellow Peril"). When the League of Nations was founded, the Japanese had a seat at the table and the Japanese Ambassador requested that its charter have a non-binding statement on human equality<small><sup>3</sup></small>, which got some support, but Woodrow Wilson vehemently shot it down, mostly because this would require him to see [[Tyranids|minorities as anything other than evil cockroaches trying to devour the white man]], and GOLLY GEE WE CAN'T HAVE THAT NOW CAN WE? This sort of thing breeds animosity at the best of times, and these times were anything but.

Things got worse with the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22, which was called by the Allied powers in an effort to prevent another naval arms race like the one that had led into the war. The practical result of the conference and its treaty was to impose strict limits on the size and firepower of capital ships and aircraft carriers and downsize the British, American, and Japanese fleets by scrapping obsolete or unfinished ships. It also saw the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance that had been signed in 1902, since the American delegates made it clear that the US felt threatened by this alliance and the British themselves weren't too sure about it anymore. Japan took both of these actions as an insult, especially the tonnage ratio imposed by the treaty, which was 5:5:3 UK/US/Japan. This meant that for every five tons of capital ship that the British and Americans built, the Japanese were only allowed to have 3 tons. The Japanese militarists and ultranationalists who'd demanded naval parity with the UK and US saw this as an insult, though a number of Japanese Navy officers, including Isoroku Yamamoto, actually supported the treaty, since they knew that Japan could never outproduce the United States. He and the "Treaty Faction" were largely ignored, and when Japan couldn't get better results at the London Naval Treaties in the 1930s, they flipped everyone the bird and started building ships that ignored the treaty limitations.

From the Meiji period onward some prominent Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves<small><sup>4</sup></small>, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward. Their first steps were pretty humble, taking back some of the Kuril Islands, Okinawa, etc. Then they stomped into Korea, renamed Taiwan "Formosa" because fuck your local names, and then logically jumped into trying to conquer all of China.

Imperialism and colonialism? No, we're doing this in the name of Asian liberation, friend! A "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" if you will. Pay no mind to the [[Grimdark|atrocious war crimes we're about to be committing]]. The Japanese kept this going into the 20th century when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after 1931, by which time the military more or less dictated the course of Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria and made it into a puppet state under the deposed Qing emperor, then invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went (around four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of the Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR efforts). Japanese forces in China occasionally attacked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Panay_incident foreign shipping], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kweilin_incident airliners], and property. Despite this, international reactions were fairly limited — the European powers were too busy worrying about Herr Hitler and Nazi Germany and America had profitable trade agreements with Japan.

* <small><sup>3</sup>Yes, there was an element of hypocrisy in the Empire of Japan making this statement. But Wilson was probably too racist to understand this or care.</small>
* <small><sup>4</sup>See previous footnote, the Japanese were very racist towards Koreans and Chinese, especially during the height of militarism. They just wanted to be the ones who were conquering all of Asia, not the Western powers.</small>

==The Second World War==
===The War in the West===
See also [[Nazi]]s and [[Fascist Italy]].

With Poland unwilling to roll over for Hitler, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist). Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. (What actually happened was this: a Polish cavalry detachment surprised and overran a group of German infantry who were taking a rest and were in turn driven off by machine gun fire from some armored cars; the actual tanks didn't show up until it was all over. Later on, German and Italian war correspondents were shown the battlefield with the tanks parked nearby and cooked up the story of "these brave dumbasses charged our tanks with lances and sabers".) But after a month of hard fighting with no help from Britain or France and with the Soviets entering the war and overrunning much of the country's western half, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, German soldiers called the period between October 1939 and June 1940 the ''Sitzkrieg'', or "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the northeast part of France in anticipation of the inevitable assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be impenetrable to the German army, as it was believed that the mobility of German tanks would be fatally hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the panzers blew through the Ardennes in days, completely buttfucking France's entire defensive strategy. France, which had held out through four years of brutal attritional warfare in 1914-1918, fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought quite hard and inflicted casualties on the German invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military ''was'' stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they ''could'' win. The Germans' success came down to several factors: tactics that focused on speed, shock, and mobility; excellent close air support from the Luftwaffe; high levels of coordination thanks to the widespread use of radio; and hard-driving generals who spotted opportunities and seized them without consulting with high command, following the longstanding Prussian-German principle of independence in the field. Combine all of these with a healthy dose of luck, and you have a perfect explanation of why the Germans succeeded. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, the British Expeditionary Force's famous evacuation from Dunkirk, and Germany annexing the north of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

After France fell, Germany went on a spree of conquest that would give any [[Axis & Allies]] or ''Hearts of Iron'' player a colossal throbbing war-boner: they overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece in the space of a year, stunning the rest of the world. It wasn't all roses for the Nazis, of course; there were large and active partisan movements in all the territories they conquered, and the invasion of the Balkans and Greece was largely because Italy had got itself spanked trying to throw its weight around in the region and ran crying to Germany for help. The latter two campaigns tied the Wehrmacht up for several months on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, potentially costing them critical time that they could have used to get to Moscow before winter set in.

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle. Chamberlain was out as prime minister after having been humiliated by Hitler's pissing all over his hard diplomatic work, and Winston Churchill was in. A man with an iron will and indomitable resolve, he led his country through the loss of HMS ''Hood'', the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain, and the fall of Burma, Crete, Malaya, and Singapore. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldiers that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the ''Bismarck'' and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch landings.

Meanwhile, the USSR and Germany had been circling each other like prizefighters before a bout. Their nonaggression pact notwithstanding, each country regarded the other as an existential threat. Hitler wanted the vast territories and resources that Russia had to offer, and he regarded the Russian people as subhuman Bolsheviks who needed to be exterminated or enslaved for the good of the Greater German Reich. Stalin, meanwhile, saw the Nazis as a pack of murderous fascists who would need to be dealt with before they could ruin the glorious USSR. Thus, even while they dismembered Poland together, the two countries were plotting to take each other down. Germany struck first, launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hilariously enough, Stalin refused to believe that the invasion was occurring at first, in spite of repeated warnings from his spies, allies, and generals. He even threatened to court-martial or execute some of the officers who first reported that the Germans were pouring across the border from Poland. Initially, Barbarossa looked like it was going to be another walkover for the Wehrmacht, since the Red Army was in a bad way. Stalin's paranoid purges in the 1930s had gotten rid of most of the army's competent, professional officers, leaving it to be led by incompetent yes-men and/or inexperienced junior officers. It was also caught in a doctrinal bind regarding the employment of its armored forces and suffering from low institutional morale because of the rough handling they'd received at the hands of the Finnish Army in the Winter War. Because of this, the Wehrmacht beat the absolute shit out of the Red Army at first, wiping out or capturing entire army groups along with seizing the entirety of Ukraine and a reasonably large slice of western Russia. Fortunately for the Soviets, the Germans spread themselves thinly enough, and the Red Army managed to fight just hard enough, that the Wehrmacht didn't make it to Moscow in time. The infamously brutal Russian winter forced the Germans to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, suffering tremendous casualties from the cold, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in the Red Army's scorched earth retreats.

===American Rearmament===
This whole time the American public had been watching the developing war. Chief among them was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was not a fan of Adolf, mostly because FDR hated imperialism (he actively worked to release the Philippines from the US - the only reason that fell through was because the Filipinos could see the Japanese quite obviously eyeing them up - and was pivotal in creating a post-war environment that would destroy the colonial regimes of Britain and France.) He convinced Congress to send increasingly generous aid to Britain, start pouring funds into the military, instituted a peacetime draft, and generally put the US into a state of readiness for war.

In spite of these changes, the American public was generally lukewarm on the idea of war in Europe, as they had been thirty years previously; they were content to let the Europeans kill each other and live their lives unbothered by the Old World's problems. Besides, the Depression was still going on, and the last thing people wanted was even more misery on top of that. Like Wilson, FDR realized that he could not go to war without changing the public's perception, so this explains the "slow" manner in which the US built up its military infrastructure. Instead, he and the generals and admirals took notes and watched carefully from the sidelines, gradually taking a more pro-Allied stance by escorting transports, allowing American destroyers to "defend business interests" in convoys, and building up a tank force and air force. Everything was going fine until the Japanese Navy ran up and kicked America in the balls at Pearl Harbor.

Rather than being shocked into peace talks or ineffectiveness, the entire country became extraordinarily pissed and Congress declared war the next day. Recruitment offices were overrun with men willing and eager to fight, and promising officers such as Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Doolittle were given important assignments. "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a rallying cry among the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur was determined to regain his prestige after the Philippines were lost under his command. Europe probably still would've been a tough sell, even with the American public ripshit pissed and out for revenge, but Hitler and the rest of the Axis neatly solved that problem by declaring war on the US right after the Pearl Harbor strike, and just like that, America was committed to the whole World War shebang.

===Mid-War===
The mid-war refers largely to the conclusion of the African campaign and the fall of Italy, and the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Freeaboos first forayed into the world of dying hard on beaches during the Torch landings, where a combination of inexperienced troops and lackluster leadership, poor logistical planning, bad intel, and a bunch of pointless and stupid red tape from the somewhat uncooperative Vichy colonial administration resulted in needless casualties. The results would be studied, with promising results for future campaigns.

After Operation Torch, the Allies pushed with great difficulty into Tunisia, cutting the Axis army off from resupply and ensuring that they couldn't be evacuated. With the Americans coming in from the west and Montgomery's army in the east, the Axis army in Tunisia was surrounded and captured with great difficulty, due to the mountainous and hilly terrain. The complete lack of useful military infrastructure that had not been left to rot by Petain made the logistics a nightmare. From there, they began preparing their next operation, which was the invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.

While the Allies were establishing a base for Free France and picking away at Italy, the Germans and Soviets were beating the absolute fuck out of each other at Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a strategically important city; its position meant that it controlled access to the oil fields of the Caucasus and passage along the Volga River, one of Russia's major waterways. Whoever controlled the city would control both of these critical resources. Besides this, Stalingrad was also a symbolically important city, since it was named after old Josef himself; losing it would have humiliated him and the Red Army. The Germans attacked the city as part of Case Blue, a general invasion of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Unfortunately for them, city fights were exactly the kind of thing their technology and tactics weren't designed for. The Wehrmacht's superiority over the Red Army at this stage of the war depended on its mobility, shock power, and armored formations. The urban combat in Stalingrad deprived them of all of these advantages, sucking them into a 5-month meat grinder of a siege that functionally destroyed any value the city would have had along with the entirety of their supplies. The Russian 62nd Army fought for literally every inch of the city, fueled by rage, patriotism, and desperation; even when the oil depots were set on fire, the city was bombed into rubble, and the Germans had driven them into a tiny pocket on the banks of the Volga, they refused to quit, hanging on and fighting tooth and nail. Ultimately, the Russians managed to encircle Friedrich Paulus and the 6th Army and fight off all attempts at relief from outside the pocket, resulting in the surrender of over 250,000 German soldiers, only 5,000 of whom would live to see home a decade later.

The landings on Sicily and Italy were enough to force Mussolini out of power, and Italy promptly changed sides to fight for the Allies. However, the theorized soft underbelly of Italy was anything but, as its rugged, mountainous terrain proved difficult for the Allies to traverse. The Germans had also predicted that Italy would hit the "change team" button and immediately executed Operation Axis, which subdued and dismembered the Italian army, stole all its equipment, and effectively seized control of the country, while a commando raid on Mussolini's prison successfully freed Il Duce. This resulted in Mussolini being established as a puppet governor in Northern Italy until he was killed by partisans, while the Germans dug into the Apennines and refused to shift. This prevented the Allies from making any meaningful progress towards Germany through Italy.

===The Normandy landings===
{{topquote|So much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide.|President Barack Obama, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day}}

Yes, Normandy gets its own section. See, the Americans had long wanted to just land in France and bash the Nazis to death much like what Sherman had done to the CSA in the American Civil War. The British managed to convince the Americans that Africa would allow them to isolate a large number of Axis troops that could not be replaced from Europe, and if Stalin continued to bleed them dry, they could take Italy. The disastrous Dieppe raid also convinced Eisenhower to shelve the idea as untenable at the moment.

Flash forward to 1944 and Italy is a stalemate, though Russia is in a much better spot due to lend-lease and having managed to relocate most of its heavy industry beyond the Urals. Stalin wants the Americans to open up another front to take pressure off of him, and the Allies oblige by preparing one of the most complicated and carefully planned landings in human history: Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of Normandy. Overlord had intelligence gathered from old Time-Life magazines, commandos, partisans, postcards, scientific reports, and anything else they could get their hands on. Weather patterns were traced back decades to predict for an ideal time to land, swimming tanks were developed, and two mobile ports were developed to help unload equipment due to the lack of ports near the beaches. On top of all that, the Allies launched a massive counter-intelligence operation, mainly convincing the Germans that a massive army group (made up of balloons to fool observation craft) stationed in Kent and led by General Patton would attack Calais. They even went one step further by dressing up the corpse of a dead homeless man as a fake intelligence officer that "drowned" off the coast of "Neutral" Spain, with fake documents of fake landing plans. It was obvious that Churchill had been so shaken by Gallipoli that he wanted to leave nothing to chance this time around.

In spite of these preparations, Eisenhower was not totally convinced they would succeed, and prior to the landings wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure of the landings. This never happened, thankfully, but the rest of the Battle of Normandy was not just on the beaches. American and British paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to hold back reinforcements and seize or demolish important enemy infrastructure, attack aircraft strafed and bombed German positions for miles around, and the strategic bombers of the USAAF were diverted from pounding German industry to provide aid. Once Normandy had been secured, it was now the beginning of the end.

===Victory in Europe===
After liberating France and Belgium, the Western Allies marched on Germany's border at the Rhine River while the Soviets blew through Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany before bumrushing Berlin. The Germans launched several desperate counter-attacks to try and break the Allies' will to fight, including the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the last-ditch offensives in Hungary and Romania. It prevented the Western Allies from pushing further than West Germany and insured the longevity of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

By this time, FDR was finally starting to realized that all the nasty things Churchill had been saying about Stalin were true; he was a liar and a paranoid, tyrannical sociopath hell-bent on carving out a swath of European territory to expand Communism and Soviet influence. While FDR's ambitions to allow countries to have their own say in their governance would be realized in the 30 years after August 1945, many countries of the Eastern Bloc would remain under the hammer and sickle as "satellite states". Even a brief attempted rebellion by the Poles to reestablish their country was brutally put down by the Nazis, while the Soviets sat on the outskirts of Warsaw and watched.

In the Battle of Berlin, the Germans fought ferociously against the Soviets, but Hitler took his life in the hours preceding the Soviets occupying the Reichstag and declaring victory. The official cessation of hostilities occurred on May 8 1945. This is known as VE Day, though in Russia it is called Victory Day, in honor of the tremendous sacrifices the men of the Red Army made during the many battles in which they fought against the German Heer.

===The War in the East===
As Japan continued to push deeper into China and signed the Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany, the US threatened to embargo the oil, steel, and aircraft parts Japan needed to keep their massive war machine running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]], except they fucked up the timing and the declaration wasn't delivered until Pearl Harbor had already been bombed to shit).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over a bunch of distant islands that didn't even belong to them (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damage, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the industrial capacity that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel and resources. <small>''To be fair, nobody* in the years leading up to World War II '''expected''' carriers to be important.''</small> Another big failure of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fact that the Japanese attack didn't touch the dockyards, dry docks, fuel depots, command centers, and the rest of the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after its ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-imperialist/nationalist ideologies, but this only reinforced the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

Despite America's obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering the Americans (who had to split their fleets across two oceans to protect against German U-boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the war in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when [[Tactical genius|Admiral Chester Nimitz]] intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying four veteran aircraft carriers, about half of the IJN's total carrier capacity at the time. This blunted the Japanese advance and threw them onto the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain. It also didn't hurt that [[Spy|American and British Naval Intelligence]] partially deciphered most Japanese naval codes in 1942.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics. The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign combined to put the IJN on the back foot; Midway cost them four carriers and a bunch of their best carrier aviators, and the prolonged attritional fighting in the Solomons cost them many more of their pilots, along with dozens of valuable ships that they couldn't afford to replace. The Japanese now found themselves as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese-occupied island from their well dug in defenders — and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots where they could do fuck-all except die slowly from starvation and disease. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War II standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. [[RAGE|Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.]]

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly, as they were in no position to hold their gains against the Allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it led to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also led to the disillusionment of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them off the mainland and out to Taiwan, and found the Chinese People's Republic in 1949.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the ''Yamato'', and her support fleet, sortied to support the Japanese Army on Okinawa ... and were promptly destroyed by massed American airpower before they got 100 miles from Japan. This cemented the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare from battleship fleets to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

===The Manhattan Project===
{{topquote|Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.|Robert Oppenheimer}}
{{topquote|Now we are all sons of bitches.|Kenneth Bainbridge}}

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

The bombs weren't ready in time to use against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is [[Skub|controversial]] [[SJW|depending]] [[/pol/|on]] [[Communism|who]] [[Japan|you ask]], and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up at Pearl, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]]. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations, with the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in its last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. This committee dissolved itself on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.

==Notes==
[[File:Cathedral Radio.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''"...We now return to the adventures of Bobby Gill and the Imperium Boys, brought to you by George Rough Ridin' Martin's Jackets. Bundle up tight, because Winter is Coming!"'']]
*Radio! While radio was being used for communications and there were a few experimental broadcasts here and there since the beginning of the twentieth century, it really took off in the 1920s as a revolutionary new form of mass media. Radios meant that for the first time you could beam music, news and other such information directly into people's homes. Radio systems (both transmitters and especially receivers) were cheap to make and comparatively easy to use and maintain. Naturally everyone wanted in on this pie from radio companies to the Americans to the Brits to the Japanese to the Soviets to the Nazis. In particular the Nazis mass produced millions of cheap [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger ''Volksempfanger''] radio sets to get one in every german house to feed a steady stream of Nazi propaganda to the German masses. FDR's famous "fireside chats" were made possible by radio, as was the speed and shock power that defined ''Blitzkrieg''.
**A quirk of Radio of this time was as a major part of the standardization of language. Beforehand most people learned how to speak from their families, friends and neighbours and accents were far more pronounced. While other things such as railways and records had some impact, having a radio set meant that there was a voice being piped into your parlour every day. It also meant that the speaker needed a Radio Voice: something which was legible to the audience especially with the crappy speakers of the early 20th century. In the UK this lead to Received Pronunciation (the clipped middle class UK accent the Imperials use in Star Wars) while in the US they went with the Midatlantic Accent (that sort of posh way you here people talk in old hollywood movies) and eventually a Midwestern Accent.
*During this time science fiction began to catch on to a wider audience. As new technologies increasingly transformed people's lives, there was interest in what the future might be like. At the same time, radio and pulp magazines gave sci-fi writers a new means to get their message out in a way that was both cheap and offered exposure to a wide audience. Ideas such as Rockets, Robots, the towering cities of the future, day to day life in them and the future of human evolution were all discussed. The downside of this was that there was also a ''lot'' of crap, since lowering the barrier of entry meant that a bunch of low end crud could be shovelled out onto the market and the editors of the magazines were often more interested in filling pages for next week's edition than putting out quality material. Even so, it did have a widespread impact. Astounding Stories magazine editor John W. Campbell got questioned by the FBI in 1944 about a story he had written about the possibility of atomic warfare and he worked out that the Manhattan Project was based at Los Alamos because of a sudden change in mailing addresses of a lot of his readers.
*Art Deco became a thing during this time and remains iconic to this day. Breaking with traditional European styles, its stylized forms, smooth lines and embellishments became widely popular. In particular, Art Deco often tried to capture a sense of motion which was important in an era when cars, planes and trains were seen as the main signs of technological triumph.
* Fordism and Taylorism! Henry Ford was a big pioneer in assembly line manufacturing, employing specialized machines to streamline production with every step tightly choreographed to shave seconds off the process. Ford himself was a disciple of Frederich Taylor, who focused on analysis and optimization (finding out how a worker did X, Y and Z and working out the best way to do the task). Fordism was the gold standard that everyone aspired to during this time period: American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet. On the other hand it could be really fucking boring for the people on the line whose job was to slot one bit of metal into another every twenty seconds for eight hours a day. It would remain king until the Japanese worked out Just-In-Time manufacturing in the 60s.
* These improvements in manufacturing evolved further with the invention of modern quality control. While America did have the largest manufacturing base at the start of WWII, it experienced many teething problems such as explosive shells failing to explode, or vehicle parts not being cross-compatible between factories. And without extremely tight tolerances, many newer technologies couldn’t be developed. New disciplines in measuring tolerances and conforming to standards helped improve the quality of these technologies. After the war, though, these standards were gradually relaxed as meeting them was expensive and American civilian manufacturers had little economic reason to make extremely high quality products, what with most of their competitors trying to rebuild from the war. Ironically enough, it would be the Japanese that would rediscover and improve upon QA tools to become an economic powerhouse in the postwar era.
* The [[Superhero]] Genre was born on the eve of WWII with the publication of Superman and exploded during the war. If a lucky American kid in the 1940s found a shiny nickel, the latest edition of Superman or Captain America would be high up the list on what they'd spend it on. Thus a cultural legacy was born that would resound for decades to come.
*In dribs and drabs the elements of fantasy literature were beginning to come together. The first Conan the Barbarian was written in 1932 and the [[The Hobbit]] was released in 1937. [[The Lord of the Rings]] was written from 1940-49, though it would be released in the '50s. Not really a cohesive whole yet, but all the pieces were there and coming together.
* Everybody smoked like fucking chimneys. In the late 19th century cigarette-making machines were developed and cigarette companies started using modern advertisement methods. Cigarettes were advertised to soldiers in WWI as a way to "relieve stress" which family members could send to the front as gifts, to women as "torches of freedom" in the 20s and 30s, and in WWII the cigarette companies made deals with the military to provide cigarettes as part of every soldier's ration pack. The link between tobacco and lung cancer was first found in 1939 by Franz Muller (and highly politically motivated at that, as Hitler famously hated cigarette smoke), but his work was met with reasonable if misplaced skepticism given that it was done in Nazi Germany and it would not be until 1950 that non-Nazis came to the same conclusions. (Hitler of all people was famed for his anti-smoking stance; he harangued his friends and cronies endlessly about the negative effects of cigarettes and even offered them gold watches as an incentive to quit.) By 1945, the average American adult smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year. True Anti-Smoking campaigns like we see today, and the general trend of people quitting smoking is only a very recent occurrence though. Just zap into any archived footage of a talk show on TV of that time and you will be amazed at how casually everyone has their own personal ash tray and is sucking on cigars and cigarettes.
** As a sidenote, Cigarette brands were one of the avenues American cultural influence started to slowly entrench itself into the public consciousness in western countries and revolutionized product advertisement. Before WW2, most countries had their own Tobacco industries, especially France and Germany, and every country their own local brands of cigarettes. The introduction of the much smoother American Virginia tobaccos changed global tastes in tobacco significantly; the old traditional European brands (like Roth-Händle or Gauloises before they were bought out) were reviled by younger people who didn't enjoy the sensation of having their lungs forcibly cut out by Cigarettes with lovely nicknames such as "Lung Torpedo". Marlboro, Lucky Strike and Camel were pushed by novel advertising strategies that emphasized brand recognition over the quality of the product itself, so if you wonder why Coca-Cola somehow still feels the need to spend millions each year on advertising, this is why.

==The appeal of the World Wars==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across entire continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern war was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval and air wars in the Pacific, the grinding hell in the Eastern Front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities. Ernest Shackleton is perhaps the perfect example. He journeyed out to the Antarctic believing the war would soon be over, then returned to find that it had become a nightmare with no end in sight, a unique perspective.

Of these two conflicts, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, and the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear "right" side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. It's hard to make easily dehumanized rank-and file villains for a narrative when the soldiers of neither side actually want to be fighting at all.

When it was all over, the country that got blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved, so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a pointless and wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WWI was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. Richthofen was the most famous fighter ace of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, as a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down when a few small mutinies arose over the matter. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive and as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other. Sometimes temporary truces were declared for around kilometer wide sectors to clear corpses, but that was about it.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs. Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium and probably forever). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WWII also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WWI, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember the deeds of Simo Häyhä or Audie Murphy than say, Alvin York (They all have Sabaton songs though!)).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

==World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the [[Death Korps of Krieg]], the [[Armageddon Steel Legion]], and the [[Valhallan Ice Warriors]].
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of [[Steampunk]]. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* [[Wolfenstein]], both the classic and reboot settings, are focused on fighting the Nazis and their Wunderwaffen. WWII gets dragged on by many decades thanks to some crazy antics including transdimensional portals, spacebases on Venus, etc.
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Poland, and Russia that's in the middle of transitioning from Imperial to Soviet, in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state. America also makes an appearance as a major air power, favoring battleship blimps and other wacky aircraft, in a campaign very reminiscent of Laurence of Arabia.
* Never Going Home is a fairly new RPG system that takes place from 1916-1918 where fighting in the Somme ripped open a goddamn hole in reality, and now eldritch beings are whispering in the ears of soldiers and telling them how to summon demons powered by the general misery caused by the conditions of trench warfare. Fun times!

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

The World Wars

2023-06-06T03:11:28Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Additional Factors */

{{Grimdark}}
[[File:MAC52_SIDEBAR_TANKS01-810x445.jpg|thumb|right|War has changed...]]
{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}

Unless you've been living under a rock in Antarctica for the past 80-odd years, there is a chance you've heard of the World Wars. They were some of the most devastating conflicts ever waged by mankind. Even today there are still noticeable economic, demographic, and ecological effects from the raw amount of destruction wrought during both wars. For all intents and purposes, the World Wars are the closest we have ever gotten to [[Warhammer 40,000]].

A brief introduction is difficult to write, but for World War I, M.A.I.N.(Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism) largely sums it up. When most people think of WWI, they envision trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, and massive artillery barrages. Meanwhile, World War II can be summarized as some [[pol|dickhead using conspiracy theories about Jews]] and geopolitics to start a war that rapidly boiled into a massive clusterfuck. When people think WWII, they typically think of Nazis, D-Day, America, the Holocaust, and maybe the Battle of Britain/Pearl Harbor/Stalingrad, depending on where they're from.

The World Wars have served as inspiration for hundreds of games, uncounted thousands of novels and comics, hundreds of movies, [[Warhammer 40,000|dozens]] [[Lord of the Rings|of]] [[Star Wars|franchises]], and overall have left a lasting impact on most of the globe, with the only minor caveat being South America. If you were to go anywhere in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, the Middle East, North Africa, China, or Russia and ask people to share stories of their relatives from either conflict, there is a good chance that someone will have a story for you to hear.

The World Wars resulted in the end of unmatched European global dominance, the collapse of the great imperial powers, and the rise of the United States and Soviet Union until the latter's collapse in 1991. The world we currently lived in has been made entirely possible by the tragedy that was the two World Wars.

==Prelude==
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century kicked off with the Napoleonic Wars when industrialization was building up steam in England, and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers<sup>1,</sup><sup>2</sup>. The American Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era and saw about 600,000-750,000 people dead but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and the issue of Slavery had been resolved. The Franco-Prussian War was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling preview of things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Many Europeans figured that in this new civilized age big wars were a thing of the past, that if war happened it would be resolved quickly with one side throwing in the towel and cutting their losses when things turned south. In the Spring of 1914 few in Europe realized that they were sitting on not only a political powder keg but also a barrel of napalm.

There are two important factors to consider in the buildup to the World Wars: ''Technology'' and ''Nationalism''. Technology is the easier of the two to understand. In the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 yards, was supported by muzzle-loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1 km, and was supplied by ox carts. Meanwhile, steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. By 1914, the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by breech-loading guns that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air, raining a spray of shrapnel over a wide area, machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute, and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, submachine guns, and chemical weapons had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were less than useless on this new kind of battlefield, and the book needed to be re-written from page one.

Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an industrialized nation could turn more of its population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do. As a specific example, Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of its population even at the peak of its power, whereas Germany mobilized nearly 20% of its population during the Great War. This period of peace had consequences in that no one had any good idea how to wage war with or against these newfangled contraptions besides [[Imperial Guard|sending in the next wave]]. People were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London whose dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich whose mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their family, job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with on a daily basis). If a civil war happened and a new noble house ended up in charge while they and their family and friends got through unharmed, they weren't going to care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties and wasn't a huge dick. There was a king somewhere and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all well and good, but politics was generally an abstract that had little to do with their everyday lives.

This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and escalated throughout the Age of Enlightenment as mass propaganda started to become a thing, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their weird languages and customs. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to instill these ideals into everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations with nationalistic populations and governments and other influential groups fond of egging nationalistic sentiment on, it doesn't take much to get them at each other's throats and keep them there.

Intertwined with nationalism is the issue of "Balance of Power"; since the end of the Thirty Years War, the various European powers had been very conscious about preventing any one nation from becoming too powerful and exerting their authority over everyone else. None of them wanted to fight a massive war that would screw everyone else over, and for the most part this rule was followed by everyone except Napoleon, who had great ambitions for France and is mostly vilified for that reason, among others.

This was one of the motivating factors behind such actions as the race to colonize Africa, the "Great Game" between Russia & Britain over India, the War of Spanish Succession where Britain and the Holy Roman Empire fought to prevent the union of France & Spain, or the clusterfuck that was the Crimean War, where a dispute over churches in the Ottoman Empire led to Britain and France declaring war on Russia, only for neither side to gain anything and lose a lot of men and respect. Napoleon had gotten damn near close to completely dominating Europe, but the alliance system played a major role in ensuring no one would get too sabre-rattly... up until Germany unified and changed the whole playing field, leaving politicians desperate and uncertain as to how far Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to go to prove Germany's prestige as a rising power. The result was an arms race that turned into a giant powder keg, which would inevitably explode with the right spark.

Either way, the full implications of all these changes were not really appreciated until it was too late. It's not that people completely had their heads up their asses, mind you. The officers of 1900-14 had taken note of developments in the Boer War and the conflicts in China. Otto von Bismarck was smart enough to see that Europe was a powder keg, and the dreadnought arms race was a clear sign of things being unsettled. Some ideas such as armoured combat land vehicles had been speculated on by the likes of [[H.G. Wells]], and there was some experimentation with armoured cars and things that might evolve into tanks during the first years of the 20th century. Even so, the scope of the shift was underappreciated, especially since there were still plenty of conservative voices in prominent places (both in the military and government) who'd downplay or ignore new technological developments and until things were tested they'd often be seen as voices of moderation against radicals and doomsayers with zero practical experience. Their disillusionment would be complete, bloody, and brutal.

*<small><sup>1</sup>The Taiping Rebellion (not to be confused with the Boxer Rebellion) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.</small>
*<small><sup>2</sup>There was also The War of The Triple Alliance (1865-70), in which Paraguay under López decided to Fight half of South America all at once and ended up getting 9 in 10 Paraguan men killed as well as a decent chunk of the women and kids after López tried to use them as soldiers, which kinda spooked Uruguay and Venezuela but Brazil didn't give a rat's ass and just kept shooting. Again it was fairly localized and South America was fairly underdeveloped, though the simple bloody mindedness of the war was an ominous foreboding of what was to come.</small>

==The First World War==
[[File:Trench warfare great war.jpg|thumb|right|Over the top, lads (sorry, no joke on this one)]]
{{topquote|The War That Will End War.|[[H. G. Wells]], 1914 (spoiler alert, [[fail|it was not]])}}

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it. The abbreviation M.A.I.N is used to refer to the big four reasons it started: Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism.

===Militarism===
Militarism on its own resulted partially from the romanticizing of knights and chivalry, and the idea that serving in the military to conquer colonies for the homeland served to make the state better as a whole. And of course the best way to conquer stuff and then to protect the stuff you'd conquered was to have better weapons and soldiers than the other guys. While most major nations participated in the rise of militarization to some degree, Germany was the keystone of the movement, as its progenitor Prussia was oftentimes called "an army with its own state". This had some factual basis, given that Prussia was born from the Teutonic Crusader State, and its military aristocracy continued to define German policy and culture well into the 20th century.

The veritable arms race in the late 1800s was meant to force peace, resulting in the development of semiautomatic pistols, advanced artillery, increasingly advanced warships, automatic firearms, and a slew of military technological innovations designed to increase the killing power of an individual soldier or unit. Most wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were colonial conflicts waged against low-tech indigenous populations or countries with shitty militaries (the Anglo-Zulu War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War) and as a result were laughably one-sided. This resulted in a general myth that war was an adventure where you got to go kill a bunch of dumb people who needed to understand that your country was better than theirs. It hadn't occurred to the top brass, or anyone else, that if the other guy has the same weapons you do, it isn't nearly as fun; this in spite of warnings from colonial veterans that such a slaughter is inevitable, especially under the old Napoleonic tactics that Europe was still using.

One thing that we'll discuss later is the dreadnought battleship, which radically altered the idea of naval warfare and made everything before them obsolete. A nation's prestige was tied to how many battleships it had, so literally everyone and their dog who could afford one was trying to get their hands on them.

===Alliances===
To prevent one country from getting too much power and hopefully prevent war through mutually assured destruction, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which ultimately coalesced into two pacts: the Triple Entente (France, Britain (kind of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria), with the United States being free to do whatever the fuck it wanted in the Americas and eastern Pacific sans Canada. The Ottoman Empire was desperately trying to stave off its imminent and inevitable collapse, and the chaos in the Balkans would eventually lead them to try and join the Central Powers.

Japan was a special case. It had an alliance with Britain to act as a sort of "check" against the Russians and their Pacific ambitions, while also serving as an valuable ally against the German Pacific colonies. The benefit was also that Russia could act as an ally against the Japanese if they ever started looking towards Australia without Parliament's permission.

Serbia's national sovereignty was guaranteed by France and Russia, and Belgium received a guarantee from Britain that they'd intervene if Germany tried to use them to just waltz into France and thereby threaten Britain. Meanwhile Italy was in theory allied to the Germans and Austrian-Hungarians, but had stuff in Austria-Hungary that they wouldn't [[Blood Ravens|feel too bad about stealing]]. [[Tzeentch|If this all sounds very convoluted, welcome to the late 1800s.]]

===Imperialism===
One of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire, or Imperialism. During the 18th and 19th centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. This all kicked off back when Spain discovered the New World and became very wealthy as a result; as stated on the [[Renaissance]] page, the other nations of Europe ''realllly'' didn't want to live under the Hapsburgs' hegemony and started competing to build their own empires. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France in order to fuel their industry and economy back home at the expense of the natives. The treatment of the indigenous population varied based on whichever European power happened to dominate a particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off; one could argue that at least that stopped the chattel slavery that was endemic to the region until the colonization, but suffice to say the natives would likely think that the chattel slavery was preferable. For a while, the competition was "merely" a case of rivalry, as each nation generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly, barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire, until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck.

The unification of Germany triggered a renewed colonial rush across the globe. Germany, having come late to the game, was determined to play catch-up, even though all of the really desirable territory in Africa and Asia was already claimed. Nevertheless, they still managed to take possession of a bunch of African territories in modern day Namibia and gained a number of island colonies in the Pacific. This ultimately led to everyone starting to side-eye each others' colonies for various reasons. Italy, for example, aspired to be master of the Mediterranean Sea, while Britain had a historical and economic/political reputation to uphold as protector of the waves with their navy, the so-called "Pax Britannica". Remember that, it'll be important.

Meanwhile Austria-Hungary wanted Balkan territories, and Germany and Japan were latecomers who wanted in on the pie. Even the Americans dipped their hand into it by taking Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. Needless to say there were plenty of instances where each empire had a vested interest in stealing territory away from each other for their own political and economic gains.

===Nationalism===
Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who looked at Britain with barely restrained jealousy and decided that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog of Europe. Enter the idea of Nationalism, a political theory that roughly states that loyalty to the state trumps all other loyalties, and that there is no higher expression of loyalty to the state than making it better than all the other states. Combine this with borderline unrestrained capitalism and social Darwinism, and you have a toxic brew of ideas: that your country "must" be better than other countries, cooperation is purely for the benefit of countering rivals and earning prestige, and diplomacy, global politics, and economics are zero-sum games that you have to win. Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism. Patriotism is a love for one's country, while nationalism is a determination to make one's country better than others even at the expense of those other countries.

Remember how we mentioned that Pax Britannica and the technological innovations will come up again later? These two, combined with nationalism, were a special point of concern for Britain. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had become the enforcer of the peace on the world's seas and the guarantor of Britain's world-spanning empire. The United Kingdom invested colossal amounts of time and money into building a world-beating fleet, equipped with the latest naval technology and manned by a highly trained pool of professional officers and sailors. They produced one of the world's first ironclad warships in 1860 and pioneered the use of propeller-driven ships, gun turrets, and torpedoes. By 1889, Britain's determination to hold onto their top-dog status at sea was formally codified as the "two power standard", whereby the Royal Navy was always to be as strong as the number two and three navies in the world. This worked just fine until 1906, when the revolutionary new battleship HMS ''Dreadnought'' was built and launched. With a uniform armament of big guns, turbine engines, and many other technological improvements, ''Dreadnought'' instantly rendered all other battleships in the world obsolete and triggered a worldwide naval arms race as other countries started building their own dreadnoughts.

In this time before the rise of aircraft carriers and submarines, battleships were still the final arbiter of naval power and a potent symbol of national prestige. Any navy that wanted to be taken seriously had to have battleships, but ''Dreadnought'' had set everyone back to square one, including the Royal Navy. Now it was possible for countries that had lacked a battleship navy to catch up with the big players, and it didn't take long for everyone on the planet to get in on the game. Aside from the usual suspects like Britain, Germany, America, Russia, and France, countries like Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were all ordering up dreadnoughts as fast as they could find the money. Wilhelm II was particularly obsessed with having a dreadnought fleet of his own; aside from the boost it would bring to Germany's prestige and military power, he had long been in love with the Royal Navy and dreamed of building a fleet just like it when he became Kaiser. He hadn't even intended to start an arms race, but when Britain saw Germany investing in a fleet that was potentially equal to theirs, they were completely unwilling to risk losing their status as the dominant naval power. Germany wasn't willing to acquiesce either, since they didn't understand why Britain was getting so upset about the whole thing until one British commentator summed up the UK's position as follows: Germany would still be the most powerful country on the continent of Europe with or without a navy, but if the Royal Navy were wiped out, Britain would instantly lose control of its empire and its position as number one superpower in the world.

A further thing to note is that nationalist tensions were starting to weaken the imperial system, as people living in countries that had been subjugated by the great empires started looking around and going "hey, fuck being ruled by a bunch of smelly dickhead foreigners!" While some countries were able to survive these tensions with more or less sensible governments, like England with the House of Commons, more often than not this resulted in outright revolt, which caused the creation of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and a swath of states formerly under the control of an empire that figured they'd be better off ruling themselves. Others were crushed under the Russians, who knew that successful nationalist movements could cause them to face similar issues with Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

The countries that were hardest hit by these successive waves of unrest revolution were none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were creaky, poor, exhausted states in dire need of reform. The solution that was attempted in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep the state from collapsing. The formation of the Dual [[Monarchy]] and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans had the failed Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks coup following the Tanzimat's abolition establishing what was intended to be a constitutional monarch but was really a military dictatorship under the delusionally idealistic and, as would be proven in a few years, seriously incompetent Enver Pasha and his fellows in high command. Others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror and oppression tactics. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the fractious and ethnically diverse Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

===Additional Factors===
Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm was first ''and'' second cousins with Tsar Nicholas of Russia and first cousins with the Tsarina, the King of England, and the queens of Norway, Spain, and Romania, and they all got along about as well as your average pack of siblings.

Another was that when the war started, a [[That Guy|certain someone]] called the United States took a [[A Game of Pretend |totally neutral and not blatantly pro-Entente]] stance by shipping vast amounts of food and materiel to Britain and funding the war via loans to the Entente powers. The massive debt that Britain and France rang up made Wall Street and Washington more and more interested in making sure their investment could be paid back. This along other things would be one of the deciding factors in American involvement in the First World War.

The Franco-Prussian War was also a sore spot for France, who were not only afraid of German encroachment, but determined to get revenge for what they had done to them. This not only contributed to France's bloody-minded determination not to quit fighting, but also influenced the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

As far as significant developments, probably one of the biggest was Wilhelm II sacking Otto von Bismarck for a yes-man. Unlike Wilhelm, Bismarck was smart enough to understand that Germany's rise was a substantial shake-up of the existing European order, and had spent years doing his best to establish Germany's strength and prestige without causing alarm to the other powers. The first Kaiser, Wilhelm I. understood this, as did his son Friedrich III. (who died 90 days into office from cancer), but Wilhelm II wanted to prove his country was better (or more to the point, he wanted to prove that ''he'' was better, as he had longstanding insecurity due to a birth defect in his left arm - a big drawback in an overtly militarized society where physical prowess was the gold standard of manliness). So he sacked probably the smartest man in the entire goddamn government because he wasn't retarded enough to create a [[Horus Heresy|massive war that would fuck everyone over.]]

===The Straw that Broke Europe's Back===
The spark that detonated the Balkans came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Young Bosnia movement, which was itself under the influence of the Black Hand, an infamous Serbian nationalist organization. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (then the biggest independent Slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When [[Just as Planned|the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli]] and declared war on Serbia. This was the first in a line of dominoes. In response, [[Not as planned|Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany]]. Germany would then invade neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict... at least on paper. In reality, after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France, England had acquired a near-monopoly on overseas trade and undisputed control of the seas, and it would have been perfectly content to let the continental powers beat the shit out of each other without getting involved...until Germany started churning out dreadnoughts of its own. As mentioned, the dreadnought arms race meant that Germany was threatening England's complete naval domination and thus the lifeblood of its empire. A frightened and suspicious Britain was champing at the bit for a throwdown, and Belgium was just the perfect excuse to get involved.

The internationalization of the conflict and the various ethnicities that the colonial empires of Europe press-ganged into service had some downright comical results, like an Indian battalion fighting in East Africa against German-led Askari tribesmen and Maori soldiers killing Turks at Gallipoli, all because because a Serbian shot an Austrian in Bosnia.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, the outbreak of diseases such as the Spanish flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. An entire generation of Europe's young men was destroyed as a result (commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

===Hell on Earth===
{{topquote|European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches.|Virginia Postrel}}

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority/superior fighting spirit, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilian population, at least for a while, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. As the war ground on, morale became so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of mass destruction. Tanks made their debut in this war, slowly rumbling through no-man's-land like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing out punishing amounts of firepower themselves, only to break down in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. Airplanes first saw use in a combat role here, and they would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow influence the negotiations in their countries' favor. The fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM, where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

===Campaigns===
====Western Europe====
{{topquote|What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?<br>— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.<br>Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle<br>Can patter out their hasty orisons.<br>No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;<br>Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—<br>The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells<br>And bugles calling for them from sad shires.|Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"}}

Of all the fronts in WWI, Western Europe is the one that's been most documented and seared into the popular consciousness. It cut through Belgium and France all the way down to Switzerland. When Italy joined the Allies, the front was extended to across the Italo-Austrian border. Germany's Schlieffen Plan was intended to be used to quickly deal with France, and once France was broken troops could be diverted to support the Eastern Front. This didn't come to pass as diplomatic pressure caused troops to be diverted East, preventing their use in the Schlieffen Plan and resulting in the offensive against France stalling out short of its goal of capturing Paris. As neither side had a real advantage over the other, they were forced to dig in for the long haul, creating the conditions for trench warfare, the ugliest and most iconic aspect of WWI. This is where all the stereotypical images of the war originated: endless lines of trenches, forests and fields reduced to blasted, muddy moonscapes, barbed wire and rotting corpses everywhere, clouds of mustard gas, and soldiers armed with bolt-action rifles and bayonets charging into no-man's-land to be slaughtered in the thousands by machine guns and artillery.

The front lines would effectively remain static throughout the war, though both sides made attempts to break the stalemate and resume a true offensive. The Entente attempted breakthroughs at the Battles of the Somme and Ypres, both of which ended in massive casualties for minimal gains. The British army suffered over 57,000 killed, wounded, and missing on the first day of the Somme, which is still the worst casualty rate in its history. Ypres was a series of battles fought in the same general area, collectively becoming known as the First through Fifth Battles of Ypres. Second Ypres saw the Germans' first mass deployment of chemical weapons, while Third Ypres, aka Passchendaele, resulted in somewhere between 400,000-800,000 casualties on both sides. Verdun was a 1916 attempt to knock France out of the war by attacking the fortified city of Verdun, a keystone of France's defensive line. The idea was to grind the French army down through sheer attrition; it backfired and wound up costing the Germans almost as many troops as it did the French (~336,000 German vs. ~379,000 French). Meanwhile, the Spring Offensive of 1918 was a last-ditch attempt to win the war after the Russian capitulation and before the Americans could show up in sufficient numbers to turn the tide. Some indicator of how well this was going to go came from Ludendorff himself, who declared that all the German army had to do was punch a hole in the Allied lines and they'd somehow just win from there.

When Italy joined the fight, basically nothing changed except that the Austro-Hungarians now had to defend their western border in addition to their south and east. The only other significant nation to join the Allies in western Europe was Portugal, who were wooed by promises of protection for their colonial empire in Africa in exchange for joining the Entente.

====Eastern Europe====
Eastern Europe receives comparatively little study compared to the Western Front, mainly because records from that time weren't well preserved or were destroyed during the chaos of the Russian Revolution. While just as bloody in some instances, it offered many more opportunities for maneuver warfare than was afforded on the Western Front. An attack by the Russians on East Prussia went terribly, but just as France hoped, it forced the Germans to divert men away from France and the Schlieffen Plan and into the Eastern Front. This slow advance by the Central Powers in the east would only be halted and reversed in 1916 by the Brusilov Offensive, a brutal assault wherein the Russians shoved the Austro-Hungarians back into their homeland.

This was too much at too high a cost, because mass desertions, poor battlefield performance, inadequate food supply and widespread dissatisfaction with the ruling aristocracy along with everything else wrong with the Russian empire saw the country basically collapse. Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate, after which he and his family were eventually murdered by the Bolsheviks, and a provisional government was set up. This government proceeded to try an attack against Austria-Hungary with horrific results, stoking further unrest. This was eventually followed by the November 1917 Russian Revolution that brought in Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks, who would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The peace agreement between Germany and Russia saw the latter have a ton of territory taken from them in March, which eventually led to the formation of the Baltic nations, Poland, and Ukraine, among others. Finland also broke away during the chaos of the revolution, and with much bigger problems on their plate, the Russians kinda just let it happen.

Meanwhile, Serbia would hold out until 1915 against Austria-Hungary, until being overrun after Bulgaria declared for the Central Powers and helped chase the Serbs into Greece. Montenegro followed a few months later in 1916. Greece eventually forced their king to abdicate and declared for the Entente in 1917. The Bulgarians were forced into an armistice after the defeat at Dobro-Pole.

Romania joined the war after seeing the debacle of the Brusilov Offensive, thinking they could join in on the tail-end and steal some land from a couple of dying empires. They were promptly disabused of this notion after they got their shit kicked in by Bulgaria, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, and their army took up a supporting role alongside the Russians until the Bolshevik revolution forced them to sign an armistice. In the end they still managed to increase their territories as a result of their participation in the conflict, so they got what they'd wanted even if it hadn't gone exactly as planned.

====Ottoman Empire====
When the guns of August started blasting, the Ottoman Empire was in the final stages of collapse. A series of military defeats throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had led to the Tanzimat period of the 19th century, which had bought the empire some time thanks to extensive reforms that had taken place, but there was increasing unrest in the Balkans and elsewhere. Though the Turks suppressed several nationalist uprisings, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 forced them to grant independence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, while Austria-Hungary walked in and took Bosnia-Herzegovina and Britain gained ''de facto'' control of Cyprus and Egypt. The empire's last throw of the dice came with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a ''coup d'etat'' that attempted to reform the empire into a democratic state by restoring its constitution and establishing an electoral system. The Italo-Turkish War in 1911 cost the Empire its North African territories and the Dodecanese, while the First Balkan War the following year cost it almost all its territories in the Balkans.

When the war broke out, the Ottomans officially declared neutrality at first, though they talked to both sides to see what they might get out of joining either one. They ultimately came down on the German side after being offered territorial concessions and a guarantee of defense against Russia, along with the Germans essentially forcing the issue by sending a battlecruiser and light cruiser through the Dardanelles strait to Constantinople. Turkey bought the ships and officially commissioned them into their navy, only for the Germans to run off and start bombarding Russia's Black Sea ports without formal authorization from the Turkish government.

Turkey's most well-known contribution to World War I was its defense of the Dardanelles, the strait which allows passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They had closed the strait to all Allied shipping not long after entering the war. This inflicted a crippling blow to Russia's economy, which depended on grain exports from the Crimea and elsewhere on the Black Sea coast. The British made several attempts to capture the strait, which would let them put ships into the Black Sea, threaten Constantinople directly, and reopen Russia's lifeline. Several purely naval efforts to smash the forts and gun positions defending the strait failed, after which Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a landing at the Gallipoli peninsula. A protracted and bloody campaign ensued which saw Australian and New Zealander troops (the famed ANZACs) being fed into the grinder while the Turks more than held their own (no thanks to high command, big thanks to then Colonel Mustafa Kemal). The British ultimately conceded defeat and withdrew their troops, and the Dardanelles remained closed for the rest of the war. The campaign became an emotional flashpoint for Australia and New Zealand, who (not inaccurately) viewed it as a senseless sacrifice of their best young men by their colonial overlords, and was part of the reason they began pushing for greater autonomy and eventually independence after the war. The failure also got Churchill fired from the Admiralty, which most people at the time figured was the end of his career. Perhaps the biggest consequence of this was the shattering of the notion of colonial invincibility, which officially ignited the spark of anti-colonialism across the globe.

Another major front for the Ottomans was the Mesopotamian campaign, which saw them fighting the British in the Middle East. Though the empire did well for the first two years, the Arab Revolt of 1916-1917, led by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Faisal bin Al-Hussein, saw Arabic irregulars waging a guerrilla war against the Ottomans that tied down great numbers of troops and ultimately led to their defeat in the theater. Britain fucked up here as well; to secure Arabic support for the revolt, they had promised to back the creation of a unified Arab state, which they would recognize after the war. They promptly reneged on that deal once the war was over, instead signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France. The agreement haphazardly carved the Middle East into a bunch of mandate territories, all of whom had and still have beef with each other for various reasons. It is still the cause of widespread resentment in the region to this day.

After the war had really gotten rolling, the Ottomans also decided they might as well do some war crimes while they were at it and promptly committed genocides against the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. [[/pol/|Turkey claimed at the time, and still insists today, that the Armenian genocide in particular was not a genocide, that the Armenians were resettled for totally legitimate military reasons, and that the Armenians were actually the ones doing the genociding, so they totally had it coming, etc etc]]. Bringing this up around anyone from Turkey is a ''really'' good way to start a fight; Turkey's founding myths rest on the notion that the genocide never happened, so the modern Turkish government is quick to banhammer any kind of pop culture that even mentions it. The average citizen either doesn't care or if educated sees any and all actions taken as desperate survival measures against colonization (not an unfair concern if one looks at Africa or India). The indisputable Turkish hero of the war and founder of the modern nation state, Mustafa Kemal, fighting at Gallipoli while the whole mess that was Anatolia at the time was taking place while Enver Pasha was in the lap of luxury pretending to be a soldier also makes sure that the modern republic is fiercely held as being wholly separate so even modernists won't agree with Western historians on this matter.

====Africa====
Before the war, most of the colonial powers seemed to agree that if a war ever started, Africa should be left out of it. The risk of breaking the grasp of the metropoli over the colonies was too great, and if the colonial powers kicked each other to the curb in Africa, it could give the natives ideas about declaring independence, especially if they were armed and trained for war. The Conference of Berlin had already stated decades ago that any war between colonial powers would set the colonies aside as neutral parties. Of course, once the war started, all the high-minded rhetoric went down the drain; the Entente saw the German colonies as easy pickings, isolated and surrounded as they were by the much bigger colonial holdings of the British, the French, and the Portuguese. Thus, Germany had lost control over most of its colonies by 1916, since it couldn't really afford to divert resources to the colonies (and the British Navy would have intercepted them anyway). In German East Africa, however, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck decided he wasn't going to let any damned Limeys roll over on him, so he rallied his small force of native askaris and German officers and led a notably successful campaign of guerrilla/mobile warfare against the British colonial troops. They managed to hold out against British, Belgian, and Portuguese armies many times their size (hell, by the time he learned Germany had lost the war, [[awesome|he was invading British territory]]).

As an equally badass postscript, when the German government finally agreed to award the askaris back pay several decades later, most of the survivors had lost their uniforms and certificates of service. To prove that they had served under von Lettow-Vorbeck, each man who came forth was handed a broom and ordered in German to execute the manual of arms. [[Awesome|Every one of them remembered their training]].

====Pacific====
Easily the quietest theater of the war. Mostly just Japan taking over Germany's scattered Pacific colonies. There were a few minor naval engagements between the German Far East Squadron and the Royal Navy and some attacks by German commerce raiders, but overall it was pretty sparse compared to what would happen in the sequel. The biggest consequence was that the Chinese had joined the Allied Powers, hoping to show solidarity with them and get some of their land back from at least one of the imperial powers that had been carving them up like Peking duck for the last century, so they were understandably pissed when Japan was awarded those German territories instead. Japan was also given a bunch of other German island colonies scattered across the western Pacific, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused all three powers to start side-eyeing each other.

===Aftermath===
The consequences of WWI cannot be understated. This four-year-long international bloodletting completely destroyed the Eurocentric world order that had persisted since the 1500s, reduced all European powers except Russia from being superpowers in their own right to second-rank states, and began the end of the age of (overt) imperialism for good. The amount of money spent on this war was enormous; Britain went from the world's biggest lender to its biggest debtor, having spent a treasury accumulated over the course of 300 years of colonial British and English history in just four years. France saw its industrial and agricultural heartlands in the northeast reduced to a shell-pocked, poisonous wasteland that is ''to this day'' unusable and dangerous from all the unexploded ordnance buried in the fields and forests. Germany had gone from its familiar Prussian semi-feudal social order to a constitutional republic with nothing to fill the social void that was left when the old Imperial elites just fucked off elsewhere and left it to the Social Democrats and Liberals to try and clean up the mess they had created. Russia was transformed into the Soviet Union and could only compensate for the extreme loss of people and infrastructure by installing a tyrannical regime and condemning millions of its own people to death in forced labour camps and engineered famines. And that's just in Europe. In the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France haphazardly carved the region up into a bunch of countries and territories with no regard ([[Marines Malevolent|or intentional disregard]]) for the cultural mixup of the lands they took from the Ottomans. This ended up creating some of the most vicious and long-lasting ethnic conflicts in history, most of which are still going on to this day, with the Iraq-Iran, Israeli-Palestinian and in general Sunni-Shi'a conflict and the Turkish-Kurdish war (of which the latter's first uprising was explicitly aided by the British) being particularly noteworthy examples. The latter one in particular is only on the way out more than one hundred and ten years later when military crackdown and drones made terrorism unviable (and Turkish Kurds realizing that living in Turkey as opposed to a nonviable independent state surrounded by hostile powers, or worse, Syria or Iraq, wasn't so bad after all). And of course all of these people ended up nursing a profound grudge against the West that would only get worse when they found themselves relegated to being a mere prize for the Soviets and the Western bloc to compete over during the Cold War. This too would end up coming back to haunt everyone involved nearly a century later. Japan gained a bunch of Pacific territory taken from the Germans, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused them to start thinking more seriously about flexing their own imperialist muscles in the region. Moreover, Japan's vocal dissatisfaction with how they were treated by the rest of the Allies after the war caused a negative feedback loop of hostility and distrust between them and the Western powers, which had direct and dire consequences in the next war.

===The Easter Rising===
Ever since they'd been incorporated into Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, Ireland hadn't been particularly happy under British rule. Things like the abolition of their parliament, the Great Potato Famine, the oppression of Irish Catholics, and the British army's heavy-handed treatment of anyone who got too unruly had caused younger Irish nationalists to conclude that nothing was going to get done unless they did it with violence. Just before the outbreak of the war, Britain had actually passed an act to grant the Irish home rule, but with Europe turning into a mosh pit, the act was suspended for a year, and then for two more periods of six months each as the war dragged on. At this point, several leaders of the nationalist Irish Republican Brotherhood decided that enough was enough and began planning an armed uprising during Easter Week 1916 to break Ireland free from the UK, even reaching out to the Germans for support. The rest of the IRB didn't think it was such a good idea and the Germans refused their initial suggestion to send a landing force, instead offering to send them some weapons and ammunition. The leaders who were planning the revolt didn't tell their foot soldiers in the Irish Volunteers until the last minute what was going on, and when the Royal Navy seized the German arms shipment, one of the less belligerent IRB leaders immediately decided to call the whole thing off. As a result, what was supposed to be a nationwide uprising was confined almost entirely to Dublin. The first day went pretty well, with the rebels taking control of the city and establishing the foundation of a government. [[Fail|Then the British army showed up with artillery and gunboats and started blasting them to shit]]. The uprising was suppressed by the end of the week, and the ringleaders were tried in military courts and executed. The executions and the brutal reprisals leveled by the British army, along with the murders of a bunch of unarmed civilians during the Rising, stoked public opinion in Ireland against the British and led to the rise of the nationalist party Sinn Fein, ultimately laying the grounds for the Irish War of Independence, the creation of the Irish Free State, and full independence in 1949.

===The Punitive Expedition===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. His actual reasons for this are unclear, but seizing supplies and/or trying to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was pretty small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

===The Warlord Era===
Around the same time, after the Boxer Rebellion failed to remove the Europeans from China, it became clear that Imperial China's days were over. After the forced abdication of the Qing Emperor, attempts to create a modern Chinese Republic quickly collapsed as regional warlords split the country among themselves, each intent on unifying China with themselves as its leader. Much like the Three Kingdoms period way back in early China, much of the military and political conflict was characterized by long, drawn-out border skirmishes with the occasional big battle, massive conscript armies, backstabbing, and leaders who were able to hold onto power so long as they had their army's loyalty. Due to an arms embargo and limited domestic manufacturing, industrialized warfare played a very limited role in the early part of the Warlord era; cavalry and bayonet charges were still viable, as very few warlords could afford the artillery and machine guns needed to make them obsolete. However, the eventual intervention of the Japanese eventually shifted the conflict away from a domestic dispute into a fight for China's survival against a technologically superior force, as covered in more detail below.

===The Empire of the Rising Sun===
Japan began emerging as something of the world power a few decades before the war. In 1854, the Japanese were peacefully telling foreigners to stay the fuck out of their country (a policy which hasn't really changed much to this day, only this time they are using things called "laws" instead of [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katanas]]) when suddenly this funny guy named Matthew Perry shows up with some warships. His purpose was to open Japan for business with the West, particularly America. Now contrary to many countries of the period that were forced to open trade at gunpoint, Japan was smart enough to realize that if they did not modernize, they'd be made someone else's bitch. This fate was something that the Japanese have loathed and regularly tried to avoid for their entire history. So after a brief civil war that may or may not have involved Tom Cruise, the Meiji dynasty was established. This began a period of rapid military, economic, and cultural expansion in Japan. Baseball is a popular sport in Japan because Japan took great early influence from the United States. They modeled themselves on Britain, especially its notions of empire, conquest, and spheres of influence; for quite a while, all orders in the Imperial Japanese Navy were given in English, not Japanese. Eventually, this led the Japanese into disagreements with the Russians over Manchurian China and the Kuril Islands. This was the cause of the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 shocked the dominant European powers because the Japanese had managed to defeat the supposedly superior Russians (though the fact of the matter was that both sides blundered hard and the weebs won because the other side was MUCH more incompetent and further from their supply lines - the Russian armada sent from the Baltic Sea to Japan suffered multiple breakdowns and almost started a war with Britain by firing on a British fishing fleet because they thought it was the Japanese). Japan was a member of the Triple Entente and as such seized some German islands in Asia, sent a small fleet into the Mediterranean to escort naval convoys and participated in an expedition alongside the US and European countries in Siberia after the revolution in Russia, but the main political activity was focused on exerting an ever increasing influence on China. After the war, Japan was awarded a permanent seat in the League of Nations, most of Germany's possessions in the Pacific, and recognition as a 'great power', but their proposal to be recognized as equals race-wise was rejected. This caused alienation from the Western powers, which in turn would partially contribute to [[RAGE|increased nationalism and militarism]] down the line.

==Side Note: The Shackleton Expedition and the End of the Age of Heroes==
Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic voyage and the perils they faced ending with the miraculous survival of all but three members and the ship's cat after incredible heroism occurred during the First World War in its entirety. Shackleton was sure that the war wouldn't last more than a few months after last hearing that Russia had mobilized and that there were some minor German victories. So what happened to the great hero and his crew of champions? They returned from their epic expedition the middle of 1916. When Shackleton asked the governor of South Georgia Island when the war had ended, the reply was that millions were dying, that Europe was mad, and that the World was mad. Expecting a well deserved hero's welcome, Shackleton and his men found abject, mute horror instead. Most of them volunteered to serve in minesweepers or on the front, and several were killed in action. Shackleton even demanded a frontline position despite his severe heart condition exacerbated by the nightmare he went through, though they resisted until the Allied intervention in the Arctic front of the Russian Civil War, where he worked until the Bolsheviks took that part and the war shifted to the Caucasus and when that was done through a deal with Turkish revolutionaries (more on that below) the chase to the Pacific across Asia. Shackleton himself passed away due to heart complications in 1922, perhaps the last larger than life hero before the world woke up to gritty reality.

==The Interwar Period==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919, being spot on}}
Believing that the world could not endure another such war, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted to set the groundwork for long-term peace between whites and "white equivalents"(Wilson was a massively racist cunt); he set forth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Unfortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (it was basically an even shittier proto-United Nations, in that at least the UN specialist agencies do important global coordination work). Most significantly, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in Congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European war.

Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge. Of note also was Wilson's hyper nationalism to the point he believed if everywhere was just like America it would be paradise on Earth, ironically being just as stubborn about forcing democracies and decolonisation as his allies were against the League despite the people involved not knowing a single thing about any of this stuff and nations (like Germany) not being too hot on democracies anyway leading to widespread political instability to the point some say (whether true or not) every issue of the modern day can somehow be traced back to this guy. He was also a huge dick on a personal level as well, the man was an exceptionally vile racist in a time when being racist was the norm. Got crippled by a stroke which precluded him from really doing anything mid-1919 onwards, killed his plans for reelection to a third term, then straight up killed him after his term was over.

Near the end of the First World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. [[Nurgle|The Spanish Flu]], which got its name because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war/didn't actively suppress the news of the epidemic, spread rapidly and killed millions thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various conflicts continued at the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French colonial forces, Islamists loyal to the Ottoman Government and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime.

The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarchy and the caliphate a year after the end of the monarchy and the Treaty of Lausanne, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing, with the only real big scare being the Bosphorus Straits affair with the Soviets, that was resolved through the Montreaux Convention in the 1930s. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

Compare this to America, which was having some of its best years. The aftermath of WWI and the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty had seen Britain concede that it could no longer maintain the two-power standard, since: 1. it couldn't afford to keep spending that kind of money and 2. this would have required the Royal Navy to compete with the US Navy, which was a friend and ally as opposed to a potential threat. As a result, the US Navy managed to achieve parity with the Royal Navy fairly quickly during the interwar period. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. Presidents Harding and Coolidge lead the country into great economic growth, to the point that most of the world would look to the NYSE as an indicator of economic health. See, unlike the European powers, it hadn't seen the deaths of millions of young men, been forced to reorient itself to the demands of a continental total war, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that happen and was taken over by communists after a civil war like Russia (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war, meaning that the country was flush with cash.

Coolidge would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). [[FAIL|Then in October of 1929 the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.]], officially earning Hoover a place as one of the worst presidents in American history.

There had been a series of stock market crashes in the US every decade or so during the the 19th century, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment becoming commonplace, loans for buying stock with, a lot of scams and the limits of the real economy which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery.

It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle-scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now tottering under the weight of an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. It culminated in a French occupation of some of the last profitable land left in Germany, the Ruhr valley, and eventually lead to a renegotiation of the payments that would be more generous to the German economy. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across whole states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things didn't seem to be working and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008, after New Deal-era financial regulations were pulled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Italy ===
See [[Fascist Italy]]. Shortly put though, as the Italians are not entirely to blame, this guy named Mussolini created a new ideology that seemed pretty snazzy, called Fascism<sup>1</sup>, that combined big government and ultra-nationalist militarism into another toxic ideology that advocated the strength and growth of the state. Italian Fascism is found in a manifesto of sorts written by Giovanni Gentile in the seminal work "The Doctrine of Fascism" for those interested in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_98uT1IZs&t=1s&ab_channel=RyanChapman|further research]. He also ruled for far longer than Hitler did, taking over as "Prime Minister" in 1922 until his removal in 1943.

The Italians conquered Ethiopia to reclaim their national honor after getting wrecked by them, and had a general foreign policy of attempting to promote international fascism. By which of course the end result would be an Italian sphere of influence. This is represented in HOI4 by the Albania tree, the attempts at Turkish influence, and their intervention in the Spanish Civil War along with the Germans. For all intents and purposes, Mussolini seemed very genuine in his intent to promote Fascism across the globe to not only promote Italian interests but to correct the "failures of liberalism" and counter those filthy Communists<sup>2</sup>. It also helps that the leader of such a movement could become wealthy and powerful as a result.

<small><sup>1</sup>Fascism with a capital "F" refers specifically to Italian fascism. With a little "f", it is a noun describing a broad ideology. [[Tzeentch|Nazism is fascist, but not "Fascist".]] [[What|Savvy?]]</small>

<small><sup>2</sup>Fascism was a reaction against the Russian Revolution and the chaos of post-war Italy. Mussolini came to power by leading a bunch of nationalist thugs that beat up Socialists and Communists in Northern Italy and eventually the Italian King and the old-school conservatives made him Prime Minister as he seemed to be effective against them.</small>

===Rise of Authoritarians: Germany===
In Germany, the economic and political failures of the Weimar Republic soured people on the whole idea of democracy, which contributed to the rise of authoritarian parties on the left like the Communist KPD, which in turn led to the creation of the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party or NSDAP) party to counter them (possibly with help from other Western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations Germany was forced to pay to the rest of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, which renegotiated or not, still put a perceived blame for the war unjustly upon them along with a variety of other complicated things that can be blamed on the [[Nazi|Nazis]]. Rounding it off was the ''Dolchstosslegende'', or "stab-in-the-back-myth", that was concocted by butthurt imperial generals like Ludendorff and Hindenburg in order to shift the blame for Germany's defeat to the Social Democrats or the [[What|historic enemy of Germany, the Jews.]]

The concurrent deeply authoritarian political culture of many German institutions as well as reactionary and monarchist industrialists like Krupp, who all backed Hitler and nationalist and antisemitic parties similar to the NSDAP (like the DNVP) and the lack of people actually willing to give a damn about the Republic itself led to the erosion of the few democratic principles left at this point. From 1930 onward, Hindenburg, who was elected President as the candidate of a coalition of nationalist and conservative parties, reigned over Germany in a dictatorial manner and named Hitler as Chancellor and head of government in January 1933, after two governments under the centrist-conservative Party Zentrum and the Nationalist DNVP failed to stabilize the economy. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up for war, and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmament were certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France after the bloodbath of the Western Front.

To their credit, in the mid '30s the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between completing the Autobahn, hosting the Olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. When the communists tried to launch a revolution in Spain, Germany and Italy sent weapons and eventually troops to curbstomp them and test out their new toys on people with wrong opinions, while Britain looked the other way and pretended not to notice that Germany suddenly had hundreds of tanks that they were legally not supposed to have, and that France and the Soviets were doing the same thing with the communist revolutionaries. So nobody was too concerned when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in the border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Then shit started to get real.

In 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, which was a direct violation of both treaties. Britain and France were concerned, but neither country was ready to go to war again, so they let it slide. Hitler took this as confirmation that they wouldn't do shit to stop him and ramped up his plans for rearmament and conquest. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria more or less peacefully, then walked into Czechoslovakia and took the Sudetenland, home to 3 million ethnic Germans. The rest of the continent was getting increasingly worried, but Hitler super-duper promised that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial acquisition, cross his heart and hope to die. Britain and France were desperate to avoid war, and Hungary and Poland also wanted some of Czechoslovakia's turf, so together they strong-armed Czechoslovakia into signing the Munich Agreement, officially ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed that the Agreement was "peace for our time" when he came home from the negotiations on 30 September 1938. A pissed-off Winston Churchill correctly predicted that Hitler wasn't going to stop at the Sudetenland, and was proven right when Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then started side-eyeing Poland and the former German territories it now controlled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Japan===
In the 19th century the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would come by and stomp all over them like they did China and Southeast Asia. During the Tokugawa period, military technology had basically stagnated as there were no pressing internal or external threats that required [[Dakka|shootier guns]] or better tactics to sort out. There was much anxiety in the Tokugawa Shogunate about this (and even a limited attempt at army modernization by at least one Japanese domain) but things came to a head in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour and ended two centuries of isolation at cannon-point. The end of the Sakoku and bombardments by US and Royal Navy ships drove the necessity of modernization home. The Shogunate bought foreign guns and ships, lifted restrictions on shipbuilding and sent diplomatic missions abroad, but the pace of modernization and Westernization really picked up after the Meiji Restoration. By 1914 Japan had a solid public education system and set of universities, a well-developed rail network, a respectable industrial base and an army and navy which had beaten the Russian Empire. In the Great War they drove the German Empire out of the Pacific. Japan had arrived on the world stage, but despite that they were still concerned about the West and its influence, what with Britain and France being two of the largest and most acquisitive colonial powers on Earth. The Japanese saw what had happened to their neighbors and wanted no part of it. Combine this with a historic ''extreme'' hard on for cultural and political independence that can still be observed to this very day, and you start to get the anxiety faced by Imperial Japan.

Even so while the Meiji Restoration was successful in its general goals, it had its faults. It did end the Tokugawa class system and introduced a parliament, but it was still largely a system set up for the benefit of a small number of well connected oligarchs. The franchise was limited to only 1% of the population, with the prominent lordlings and industrialists who'd backed the Emperor in the Boshin War and their kids being disproportionately prominent in Japanese society. There would be considerable push for reform after the Great War (in particular there was universal male suffrage in 1925), but there would also be strong pushback by conservatives and militarist ultranationalists, especially after a huge earthquake devastated Tokyo in 1926 and the Great Depression came along to wallop the Japanese economy. Unlike their later partners in the Axis, there was no Japanese Hitler or Mussolini figure who masterminded and led a movement which came to dictate authority. Instead Japan had a collection of right-wing cranks and extremists and a military which was off the chain. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were loyal only to the Emperor (and in practice they just did whatever they wanted and asked the Emperor for permission after the fact) and the Diet had very little power over them at the best of times. Technically the Meiji Parliament continued to putter on, but from 1931-45 it was marginalized and subverted. Whenever prominent liberals and socialists who oppose rampant militarism get ganked by radical thugs who are pardoned by judges who are either on board with the militarists or afraid that they'll get ganked themselves, the power and influence of said nationalist militarists will steadily grow until they can more or less do as they please, specifically getting their imperialism on.

Even though the Japanese had managed to modernize rapidly in a short span of time and kicked the shit out of the Russians, they were still often seen as inferiors by white people, [[Imperial Japanese Equipment|"yellow monkeys who could only copy what white folk invented" and other such nonsense]]. Some people like Wilhelm II and some nativist shitheads in the US, Canada and Australia saw the Japanese and East Asians in general as still being lesser, but still capable enough to be a threat ("The Yellow Peril"). When the League of Nations was founded, the Japanese had a seat at the table and the Japanese Ambassador requested that its charter have a non-binding statement on human equality<small><sup>3</sup></small>, which got some support, but Woodrow Wilson vehemently shot it down, mostly because this would require him to see [[Tyranids|minorities as anything other than evil cockroaches trying to devour the white man]], and GOLLY GEE WE CAN'T HAVE THAT NOW CAN WE? This sort of thing breeds animosity at the best of times, and these times were anything but.

Things got worse with the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22, which was called by the Allied powers in an effort to prevent another naval arms race like the one that had led into the war. The practical result of the conference and its treaty was to impose strict limits on the size and firepower of capital ships and aircraft carriers and downsize the British, American, and Japanese fleets by scrapping obsolete or unfinished ships. It also saw the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance that had been signed in 1902, since the American delegates made it clear that the US felt threatened by this alliance and the British themselves weren't too sure about it anymore. Japan took both of these actions as an insult, especially the tonnage ratio imposed by the treaty, which was 5:5:3 UK/US/Japan. This meant that for every five tons of capital ship that the British and Americans built, the Japanese were only allowed to have 3 tons. The Japanese militarists and ultranationalists who'd demanded naval parity with the UK and US saw this as an insult, though a number of Japanese Navy officers, including Isoroku Yamamoto, actually supported the treaty, since they knew that Japan could never outproduce the United States. He and the "Treaty Faction" were largely ignored, and when Japan couldn't get better results at the London Naval Treaties in the 1930s, they flipped everyone the bird and started building ships that ignored the treaty limitations.

From the Meiji period onward some prominent Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves<small><sup>4</sup></small>, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward. Their first steps were pretty humble, taking back some of the Kuril Islands, Okinawa, etc. Then they stomped into Korea, renamed Taiwan "Formosa" because fuck your local names, and then logically jumped into trying to conquer all of China.

Imperialism and colonialism? No, we're doing this in the name of Asian liberation, friend! A "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" if you will. Pay no mind to the [[Grimdark|atrocious war crimes we're about to be committing]]. The Japanese kept this going into the 20th century when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after 1931, by which time the military more or less dictated the course of Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria and made it into a puppet state under the deposed Qing emperor, then invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went (around four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of the Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR efforts). Japanese forces in China occasionally attacked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Panay_incident foreign shipping], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kweilin_incident airliners], and property. Despite this, international reactions were fairly limited — the European powers were too busy worrying about Herr Hitler and Nazi Germany and America had profitable trade agreements with Japan.

* <small><sup>3</sup>Yes, there was an element of hypocrisy in the Empire of Japan making this statement. But Wilson was probably too racist to understand this or care.</small>
* <small><sup>4</sup>See previous footnote, the Japanese were very racist towards Koreans and Chinese, especially during the height of militarism. They just wanted to be the ones who were conquering all of Asia, not the Western powers.</small>

==The Second World War==
===The War in the West===
See also [[Nazi]]s and [[Fascist Italy]].

With Poland unwilling to roll over for Hitler, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist). Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. (What actually happened was this: a Polish cavalry detachment surprised and overran a group of German infantry who were taking a rest and were in turn driven off by machine gun fire from some armored cars; the actual tanks didn't show up until it was all over. Later on, German and Italian war correspondents were shown the battlefield with the tanks parked nearby and cooked up the story of "these brave dumbasses charged our tanks with lances and sabers".) But after a month of hard fighting with no help from Britain or France and with the Soviets entering the war and overrunning much of the country's western half, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, German soldiers called the period between October 1939 and June 1940 the ''Sitzkrieg'', or "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the northeast part of France in anticipation of the inevitable assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be impenetrable to the German army, as it was believed that the mobility of German tanks would be fatally hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the panzers blew through the Ardennes in days, completely buttfucking France's entire defensive strategy. France, which had held out through four years of brutal attritional warfare in 1914-1918, fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought quite hard and inflicted casualties on the German invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military ''was'' stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they ''could'' win. The Germans' success came down to several factors: tactics that focused on speed, shock, and mobility; excellent close air support from the Luftwaffe; high levels of coordination thanks to the widespread use of radio; and hard-driving generals who spotted opportunities and seized them without consulting with high command, following the longstanding Prussian-German principle of independence in the field. Combine all of these with a healthy dose of luck, and you have a perfect explanation of why the Germans succeeded. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, the British Expeditionary Force's famous evacuation from Dunkirk, and Germany annexing the north of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

After France fell, Germany went on a spree of conquest that would give any [[Axis & Allies]] or ''Hearts of Iron'' player a colossal throbbing war-boner: they overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece in the space of a year, stunning the rest of the world. It wasn't all roses for the Nazis, of course; there were large and active partisan movements in all the territories they conquered, and the invasion of the Balkans and Greece was largely because Italy had got itself spanked trying to throw its weight around in the region and ran crying to Germany for help. The latter two campaigns tied the Wehrmacht up for several months on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, potentially costing them critical time that they could have used to get to Moscow before winter set in.

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle. Chamberlain was out as prime minister after having been humiliated by Hitler's pissing all over his hard diplomatic work, and Winston Churchill was in. A man with an iron will and indomitable resolve, he led his country through the loss of HMS ''Hood'', the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain, and the fall of Burma, Crete, Malaya, and Singapore. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldiers that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the ''Bismarck'' and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch landings.

Meanwhile, the USSR and Germany had been circling each other like prizefighters before a bout. Their nonaggression pact notwithstanding, each country regarded the other as an existential threat. Hitler wanted the vast territories and resources that Russia had to offer, and he regarded the Russian people as subhuman Bolsheviks who needed to be exterminated or enslaved for the good of the Greater German Reich. Stalin, meanwhile, saw the Nazis as a pack of murderous fascists who would need to be dealt with before they could ruin the glorious USSR. Thus, even while they dismembered Poland together, the two countries were plotting to take each other down. Germany struck first, launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hilariously enough, Stalin refused to believe that the invasion was occurring at first, in spite of repeated warnings from his spies, allies, and generals. He even threatened to court-martial or execute some of the officers who first reported that the Germans were pouring across the border from Poland. Initially, Barbarossa looked like it was going to be another walkover for the Wehrmacht, since the Red Army was in a bad way. Stalin's paranoid purges in the 1930s had gotten rid of most of the army's competent, professional officers, leaving it to be led by incompetent yes-men and/or inexperienced junior officers. It was also caught in a doctrinal bind regarding the employment of its armored forces and suffering from low institutional morale because of the rough handling they'd received at the hands of the Finnish Army in the Winter War. Because of this, the Wehrmacht beat the absolute shit out of the Red Army at first, wiping out or capturing entire army groups along with seizing the entirety of Ukraine and a reasonably large slice of western Russia. Fortunately for the Soviets, the Germans spread themselves thinly enough, and the Red Army managed to fight just hard enough, that the Wehrmacht didn't make it to Moscow in time. The infamously brutal Russian winter forced the Germans to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, suffering tremendous casualties from the cold, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in the Red Army's scorched earth retreats.

===American Rearmament===
This whole time the American public had been watching the developing war. Chief among them was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was not a fan of Adolf, mostly because FDR hated imperialism (he actively worked to release the Philippines from the US - the only reason that fell through was because the Filipinos could see the Japanese quite obviously eyeing them up - and was pivotal in creating a post-war environment that would destroy the colonial regimes of Britain and France.) He convinced Congress to send increasingly generous aid to Britain, start pouring funds into the military, instituted a peacetime draft, and generally put the US into a state of readiness for war.

In spite of these changes, the American public was generally lukewarm on the idea of war in Europe, as they had been thirty years previously; they were content to let the Europeans kill each other and live their lives unbothered by the Old World's problems. Besides, the Depression was still going on, and the last thing people wanted was even more misery on top of that. Like Wilson, FDR realized that he could not go to war without changing the public's perception, so this explains the "slow" manner in which the US built up its military infrastructure. Instead, he and the generals and admirals took notes and watched carefully from the sidelines, gradually taking a more pro-Allied stance by escorting transports, allowing American destroyers to "defend business interests" in convoys, and building up a tank force and air force. Everything was going fine until the Japanese Navy ran up and kicked America in the balls at Pearl Harbor.

Rather than being shocked into peace talks or ineffectiveness, the entire country became extraordinarily pissed and Congress declared war the next day. Recruitment offices were overrun with men willing and eager to fight, and promising officers such as Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Doolittle were given important assignments. "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a rallying cry among the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur was determined to regain his prestige after the Philippines were lost under his command. Europe probably still would've been a tough sell, even with the American public ripshit pissed and out for revenge, but Hitler and the rest of the Axis neatly solved that problem by declaring war on the US right after the Pearl Harbor strike, and just like that, America was committed to the whole World War shebang.

===Mid-War===
The mid-war refers largely to the conclusion of the African campaign and the fall of Italy, and the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Freeaboos first forayed into the world of dying hard on beaches during the Torch landings, where a combination of inexperienced troops and lackluster leadership, poor logistical planning, bad intel, and a bunch of pointless and stupid red tape from the somewhat uncooperative Vichy colonial administration resulted in needless casualties. The results would be studied, with promising results for future campaigns.

After Operation Torch, the Allies pushed with great difficulty into Tunisia, cutting the Axis army off from resupply and ensuring that they couldn't be evacuated. With the Americans coming in from the west and Montgomery's army in the east, the Axis army in Tunisia was surrounded and captured with great difficulty, due to the mountainous and hilly terrain. The complete lack of useful military infrastructure that had not been left to rot by Petain made the logistics a nightmare. From there, they began preparing their next operation, which was the invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.

While the Allies were establishing a base for Free France and picking away at Italy, the Germans and Soviets were beating the absolute fuck out of each other at Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a strategically important city; its position meant that it controlled access to the oil fields of the Caucasus and passage along the Volga River, one of Russia's major waterways. Whoever controlled the city would control both of these critical resources. Besides this, Stalingrad was also a symbolically important city, since it was named after old Josef himself; losing it would have humiliated him and the Red Army. The Germans attacked the city as part of Case Blue, a general invasion of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Unfortunately for them, city fights were exactly the kind of thing their technology and tactics weren't designed for. The Wehrmacht's superiority over the Red Army at this stage of the war depended on its mobility, shock power, and armored formations. The urban combat in Stalingrad deprived them of all of these advantages, sucking them into a 5-month meat grinder of a siege that functionally destroyed any value the city would have had along with the entirety of their supplies. The Russian 62nd Army fought for literally every inch of the city, fueled by rage, patriotism, and desperation; even when the oil depots were set on fire, the city was bombed into rubble, and the Germans had driven them into a tiny pocket on the banks of the Volga, they refused to quit, hanging on and fighting tooth and nail. Ultimately, the Russians managed to encircle Friedrich Paulus and the 6th Army and fight off all attempts at relief from outside the pocket, resulting in the surrender of over 250,000 German soldiers, only 5,000 of whom would live to see home a decade later.

The landings on Sicily and Italy were enough to force Mussolini out of power, and Italy promptly changed sides to fight for the Allies. However, the theorized soft underbelly of Italy was anything but, as its rugged, mountainous terrain proved difficult for the Allies to traverse. The Germans had also predicted that Italy would hit the "change team" button and immediately executed Operation Axis, which subdued and dismembered the Italian army, stole all its equipment, and effectively seized control of the country, while a commando raid on Mussolini's prison successfully freed Il Duce. This resulted in Mussolini being established as a puppet governor in Northern Italy until he was killed by partisans, while the Germans dug into the Apennines and refused to shift. This prevented the Allies from making any meaningful progress towards Germany through Italy.

===The Normandy landings===
{{topquote|So much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide.|President Barack Obama, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day}}

Yes, Normandy gets its own section. See, the Americans had long wanted to just land in France and bash the Nazis to death much like what Sherman had done to the CSA in the American Civil War. The British managed to convince the Americans that Africa would allow them to isolate a large number of Axis troops that could not be replaced from Europe, and if Stalin continued to bleed them dry, they could take Italy. The disastrous Dieppe raid also convinced Eisenhower to shelve the idea as untenable at the moment.

Flash forward to 1944 and Italy is a stalemate, though Russia is in a much better spot due to lend-lease and having managed to relocate most of its heavy industry beyond the Urals. Stalin wants the Americans to open up another front to take pressure off of him, and the Allies oblige by preparing one of the most complicated and carefully planned landings in human history: Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of Normandy. Overlord had intelligence gathered from old Time-Life magazines, commandos, partisans, postcards, scientific reports, and anything else they could get their hands on. Weather patterns were traced back decades to predict for an ideal time to land, swimming tanks were developed, and two mobile ports were developed to help unload equipment due to the lack of ports near the beaches. On top of all that, the Allies launched a massive counter-intelligence operation, mainly convincing the Germans that a massive army group (made up of balloons to fool observation craft) stationed in Kent and led by General Patton would attack Calais. They even went one step further by dressing up the corpse of a dead homeless man as a fake intelligence officer that "drowned" off the coast of "Neutral" Spain, with fake documents of fake landing plans. It was obvious that Churchill had been so shaken by Gallipoli that he wanted to leave nothing to chance this time around.

In spite of these preparations, Eisenhower was not totally convinced they would succeed, and prior to the landings wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure of the landings. This never happened, thankfully, but the rest of the Battle of Normandy was not just on the beaches. American and British paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to hold back reinforcements and seize or demolish important enemy infrastructure, attack aircraft strafed and bombed German positions for miles around, and the strategic bombers of the USAAF were diverted from pounding German industry to provide aid. Once Normandy had been secured, it was now the beginning of the end.

===Victory in Europe===
After liberating France and Belgium, the Western Allies marched on Germany's border at the Rhine River while the Soviets blew through Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany before bumrushing Berlin. The Germans launched several desperate counter-attacks to try and break the Allies' will to fight, including the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the last-ditch offensives in Hungary and Romania. It prevented the Western Allies from pushing further than West Germany and insured the longevity of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

By this time, FDR was finally starting to realized that all the nasty things Churchill had been saying about Stalin were true; he was a liar and a paranoid, tyrannical sociopath hell-bent on carving out a swath of European territory to expand Communism and Soviet influence. While FDR's ambitions to allow countries to have their own say in their governance would be realized in the 30 years after August 1945, many countries of the Eastern Bloc would remain under the hammer and sickle as "satellite states". Even a brief attempted rebellion by the Poles to reestablish their country was brutally put down by the Nazis, while the Soviets sat on the outskirts of Warsaw and watched.

In the Battle of Berlin, the Germans fought ferociously against the Soviets, but Hitler took his life in the hours preceding the Soviets occupying the Reichstag and declaring victory. The official cessation of hostilities occurred on May 8 1945. This is known as VE Day, though in Russia it is called Victory Day, in honor of the tremendous sacrifices the men of the Red Army made during the many battles in which they fought against the German Heer.

===The War in the East===
As Japan continued to push deeper into China and signed the Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany, the US threatened to embargo the oil, steel, and aircraft parts Japan needed to keep their massive war machine running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]], except they fucked up the timing and the declaration wasn't delivered until Pearl Harbor had already been bombed to shit).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over a bunch of distant islands that didn't even belong to them (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damage, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the industrial capacity that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel and resources. <small>''To be fair, nobody* in the years leading up to World War II '''expected''' carriers to be important.''</small> Another big failure of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fact that the Japanese attack didn't touch the dockyards, dry docks, fuel depots, command centers, and the rest of the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after its ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-imperialist/nationalist ideologies, but this only reinforced the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

Despite America's obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering the Americans (who had to split their fleets across two oceans to protect against German U-boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the war in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when [[Tactical genius|Admiral Chester Nimitz]] intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying four veteran aircraft carriers, about half of the IJN's total carrier capacity at the time. This blunted the Japanese advance and threw them onto the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain. It also didn't hurt that [[Spy|American and British Naval Intelligence]] partially deciphered most Japanese naval codes in 1942.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics. The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign combined to put the IJN on the back foot; Midway cost them four carriers and a bunch of their best carrier aviators, and the prolonged attritional fighting in the Solomons cost them many more of their pilots, along with dozens of valuable ships that they couldn't afford to replace. The Japanese now found themselves as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese-occupied island from their well dug in defenders — and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots where they could do fuck-all except die slowly from starvation and disease. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War II standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. [[RAGE|Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.]]

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly, as they were in no position to hold their gains against the Allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it led to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also led to the disillusionment of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them off the mainland and out to Taiwan, and found the Chinese People's Republic in 1949.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the ''Yamato'', and her support fleet, sortied to support the Japanese Army on Okinawa ... and were promptly destroyed by massed American airpower before they got 100 miles from Japan. This cemented the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare from battleship fleets to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

===The Manhattan Project===
{{topquote|Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.|Robert Oppenheimer}}
{{topquote|Now we are all sons of bitches.|Kenneth Bainbridge}}

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

The bombs weren't ready in time to use against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is [[Skub|controversial]] [[SJW|depending]] [[/pol/|on]] [[Communism|who]] [[Japan|you ask]], and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up at Pearl, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]]. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations, with the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in its last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. This committee dissolved itself on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.

==Notes==
[[File:Cathedral Radio.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''"...We now return to the adventures of Bobby Gill and the Imperium Boys, brought to you by George Rough Ridin' Martin's Jackets. Bundle up tight, because Winter is Coming!"'']]
*Radio! While radio was being used for communications and there were a few experimental broadcasts here and there since the beginning of the twentieth century, it really took off in the 1920s as a revolutionary new form of mass media. Radios meant that for the first time you could beam music, news and other such information directly into people's homes. Radio systems (both transmitters and especially receivers) were cheap to make and comparatively easy to use and maintain. Naturally everyone wanted in on this pie from radio companies to the Americans to the Brits to the Japanese to the Soviets to the Nazis. In particular the Nazis mass produced millions of cheap [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger ''Volksempfanger''] radio sets to get one in every german house to feed a steady stream of Nazi propaganda to the German masses. FDR's famous "fireside chats" were made possible by radio, as was the speed and shock power that defined ''Blitzkrieg''.
**A quirk of Radio of this time was as a major part of the standardization of language. Beforehand most people learned how to speak from their families, friends and neighbours and accents were far more pronounced. While other things such as railways and records had some impact, having a radio set meant that there was a voice being piped into your parlour every day. It also meant that the speaker needed a Radio Voice: something which was legible to the audience especially with the crappy speakers of the early 20th century. In the UK this lead to Received Pronunciation (the clipped middle class UK accent the Imperials use in Star Wars) while in the US they went with the Midatlantic Accent (that sort of posh way you here people talk in old hollywood movies) and eventually a Midwestern Accent.
*During this time science fiction began to catch on to a wider audience. As new technologies increasingly transformed people's lives, there was interest in what the future might be like. At the same time, radio and pulp magazines gave sci-fi writers a new means to get their message out in a way that was both cheap and offered exposure to a wide audience. Ideas such as Rockets, Robots, the towering cities of the future, day to day life in them and the future of human evolution were all discussed. The downside of this was that there was also a ''lot'' of crap, since lowering the barrier of entry meant that a bunch of low end crud could be shovelled out onto the market and the editors of the magazines were often more interested in filling pages for next week's edition than putting out quality material. Even so, it did have a widespread impact. Astounding Stories magazine editor John W. Campbell got questioned by the FBI in 1944 about a story he had written about the possibility of atomic warfare and he worked out that the Manhattan Project was based at Los Alamos because of a sudden change in mailing addresses of a lot of his readers.
*Art Deco became a thing during this time and remains iconic to this day. Breaking with traditional European styles, its stylized forms, smooth lines and embellishments became widely popular. In particular, Art Deco often tried to capture a sense of motion which was important in an era when cars, planes and trains were seen as the main signs of technological triumph.
* Fordism and Taylorism! Henry Ford was a big pioneer in assembly line manufacturing, employing specialized machines to streamline production with every step tightly choreographed to shave seconds off the process. Ford himself was a disciple of Frederich Taylor, who focused on analysis and optimization (finding out how a worker did X, Y and Z and working out the best way to do the task). Fordism was the gold standard that everyone aspired to during this time period: American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet. On the other hand it could be really fucking boring for the people on the line whose job was to slot one bit of metal into another every twenty seconds for eight hours a day. It would remain king until the Japanese worked out Just-In-Time manufacturing in the 60s.
* These improvements in manufacturing evolved further with the invention of modern quality control. While America did have the largest manufacturing base at the start of WWII, it experienced many teething problems such as explosive shells failing to explode, or vehicle parts not being cross-compatible between factories. And without extremely tight tolerances, many newer technologies couldn’t be developed. New disciplines in measuring tolerances and conforming to standards helped improve the quality of these technologies. After the war, though, these standards were gradually relaxed as meeting them was expensive and American civilian manufacturers had little economic reason to make extremely high quality products, what with most of their competitors trying to rebuild from the war. Ironically enough, it would be the Japanese that would rediscover and improve upon QA tools to become an economic powerhouse in the postwar era.
* The [[Superhero]] Genre was born on the eve of WWII with the publication of Superman and exploded during the war. If a lucky American kid in the 1940s found a shiny nickel, the latest edition of Superman or Captain America would be high up the list on what they'd spend it on. Thus a cultural legacy was born that would resound for decades to come.
*In dribs and drabs the elements of fantasy literature were beginning to come together. The first Conan the Barbarian was written in 1932 and the [[The Hobbit]] was released in 1937. [[The Lord of the Rings]] was written from 1940-49, though it would be released in the '50s. Not really a cohesive whole yet, but all the pieces were there and coming together.
* Everybody smoked like fucking chimneys. In the late 19th century cigarette-making machines were developed and cigarette companies started using modern advertisement methods. Cigarettes were advertised to soldiers in WWI as a way to "relieve stress" which family members could send to the front as gifts, to women as "torches of freedom" in the 20s and 30s, and in WWII the cigarette companies made deals with the military to provide cigarettes as part of every soldier's ration pack. The link between tobacco and lung cancer was first found in 1939 by Franz Muller (and highly politically motivated at that, as Hitler famously hated cigarette smoke), but his work was met with reasonable if misplaced skepticism given that it was done in Nazi Germany and it would not be until 1950 that non-Nazis came to the same conclusions. (Hitler of all people was famed for his anti-smoking stance; he harangued his friends and cronies endlessly about the negative effects of cigarettes and even offered them gold watches as an incentive to quit.) By 1945, the average American adult smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year. True Anti-Smoking campaigns like we see today, and the general trend of people quitting smoking is only a very recent occurrence though. Just zap into any archived footage of a talk show on TV of that time and you will be amazed at how casually everyone has their own personal ash tray and is sucking on cigars and cigarettes.
** As a sidenote, Cigarette brands were one of the avenues American cultural influence started to slowly entrench itself into the public consciousness in western countries and revolutionized product advertisement. Before WW2, most countries had their own Tobacco industries, especially France and Germany, and every country their own local brands of cigarettes. The introduction of the much smoother American Virginia tobaccos changed global tastes in tobacco significantly; the old traditional European brands (like Roth-Händle or Gauloises before they were bought out) were reviled by younger people who didn't enjoy the sensation of having their lungs forcibly cut out by Cigarettes with lovely nicknames such as "Lung Torpedo". Marlboro, Lucky Strike and Camel were pushed by novel advertising strategies that emphasized brand recognition over the quality of the product itself, so if you wonder why Coca-Cola somehow still feels the need to spend millions each year on advertising, this is why.

==The appeal of the World Wars==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across entire continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern war was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval and air wars in the Pacific, the grinding hell in the Eastern Front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities. Ernest Shackleton is perhaps the perfect example. He journeyed out to the Antarctic believing the war would soon be over, then returned to find that it had become a nightmare with no end in sight, a unique perspective.

Of these two conflicts, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, and the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear "right" side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. It's hard to make easily dehumanized rank-and file villains for a narrative when the soldiers of neither side actually want to be fighting at all.

When it was all over, the country that got blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved, so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a pointless and wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WWI was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. Richthofen was the most famous fighter ace of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, as a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down when a few small mutinies arose over the matter. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive and as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other. Sometimes temporary truces were declared for around kilometer wide sectors to clear corpses, but that was about it.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs. Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium and probably forever). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WWII also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WWI, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember the deeds of Simo Häyhä or Audie Murphy than say, Alvin York (They all have Sabaton songs though!)).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

==World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the [[Death Korps of Krieg]], the [[Armageddon Steel Legion]], and the [[Valhallan Ice Warriors]].
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of [[Steampunk]]. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* [[Wolfenstein]], both the classic and reboot settings, are focused on fighting the Nazis and their Wunderwaffen. WWII gets dragged on by many decades thanks to some crazy antics including transdimensional portals, spacebases on Venus, etc.
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Poland, and Russia that's in the middle of transitioning from Imperial to Soviet, in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state. America also makes an appearance as a major air power, favoring battleship blimps and other wacky aircraft, in a campaign very reminiscent of Laurence of Arabia.
* Never Going Home is a fairly new RPG system that takes place from 1916-1918 where fighting in the Somme ripped open a goddamn hole in reality, and now eldritch beings are whispering in the ears of soldiers and telling them how to summon demons powered by the general misery caused by the conditions of trench warfare. Fun times!

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Bretonnia

2023-06-03T07:56:51Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711:

{{british}}
[[Image:Bretonnia Cover.png|thumb|300px|right|KNIGHTS KNIGHTS CHIVALRY HORSES KNIGHTS]]
{{topquote|Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright, that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong; that is your oath.|Godfrey of Ibelin, ''Kingdom of Heaven''}}
{{topquote|We have political systems like this in the Empire. We call them 'protection rackets'.|Matthias von Pfeildorf, former Imperial Envoy to Couronne.}}
{{topquote|Help! Help! I'm being repressed!|Dennis the Constitutional Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail}}
{{topquote|I'm French! Why do you zink I 'ave zis outrageous accent?!|also Monty Python and the Holy Grail}}

'''Bretonnia''' is one of the main factions in [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]. It is a human nation roughly modelled on a combination of medieval France, a tiny pinch of England and every medieval tale of chivalry ever (especially the legends of King Arthur). At a glance, they could easily be [[Games Workshop]]'s least creative race, in any game, ever. And yes, that includes <s>[[Judge Dredd]]</s> [[Adeptus Arbites]]. One of their special characters is called [[The Green Knight]], and their goddess is the Lady of the Lake (later revealed to also be part of the Elven pantheon). Even the name of the kingdom is derived from Britannia (Roman Empire-ruled Britain) and Brittany (part of northwestern France). It's pretty lazy, all things considered.

However, it is still inventive in one way: In Bretonnia, the ideals of medieval chivalry and high honour is presented side-by-side with horrible, almost hilarious black-comedy level of oppressive government. The greatest heroic knights could also at the same time be the sort of charmer who worries about soiling their poulaines while stepping over starving peasant orphans, and your armies will be made of equal parts saintly knightly warriors and wretched peasants who get sent to die in droves in the name of feudal responsibilities. It's gotten to the point where a large part of the charm of Bretonnia is in its black comedy value, in terms of social commentary.

At least for some people anyway, and in a particular edition. Like with most Warhammer lore post-[[shitstorm|End Times]], there's a significant fan divide between which "version" of lore is best, with the main contenders for Bretonnia being 5th edition - written by Nigel Stillman - and 6th edition - written by Anthony Reynolds. Stillman's take on Bretonnia was significantly lighter than that of Reynolds, with a more generic Arthurian kingdom but lacking in what many called [[grimderp]] lore decisions by Reynolds; on the other hand, defenders of the latter say Stillman's was lacking in realism, and Reynolds' is more interesting. Basically, 5th edition fans argue 6th's tone is too dark and that's bad, while 6th edition fans argue 5th's tone is too bright and that's bad. It's an argument that's went on for over 15 years, until [[Fail|the entire army and country was eliminated in]] [[The End Times]], paving the way for [[Age of Sigmar]], where the faction still hasn't come back in any form as of 2023.

Bretonnian armies basically consist of [[knight]]s. Lots and lots of knights. And everyone, from the lowliest Knight Errant to the living-god Grail Knights, rides the same. Damn. Horse. Except for the ones that ride [[Pegasus|Pegasi]]. There are also some lowly, filthy peasants that support the knights (by which we mean they're ''very cost-effective'' meatshields).

The army is currently very old and very out of date, although still readily available, there are some rumours concerning them though. This is unfortunate since WFB 8th edition [[nerf]]ed cavalry pretty hard. They're still workable, but they're hurting pretty badly. Some denizens of /tg/ argue that Bretonnia should just be [[squat]]ted, as they don't have anything over any other army. Seriously, the Empire (ostensibly an infantry-based army) has better cavalry than these guys.

For what it's worth, they're still a major player in the fluff, arguably sharing the "protagonist" stage with the Empire (or at least being the co-star) in the Glottkin End Times book, though the plot material of "Thanquol" seems to have finally done in the nation as an independent entity.

As of March 26th, 2016, the entire Bretonnian range has been added to Games Workshop's 'Last Chance to Buy' section, so it seems like the Brets are finally gone for good. Though due to the aforementioned fading relevance as an army, lack of creativity and stand-out characters, some actually arguing for squatting, and all that even before the End Times and Age of Sigmar, few can honestly say they didn’t see this coming. Compared to [[Tomb Kings]], outrage over the loss seems to be rather lukewarm. But maybe this was because the Tomb Kings were the first to get axed, and one of GW's more creative races to boot, whereas the Bretonnians were designed by watching [[/tv/|Excalibur]] and moulding one horse. Some may say it's also because the Tomb Kings were more popular than the Brets but that's [[Skub|subjective]].

==History==
Long before the land now known as Bretonnia was founded, it was inhabited by the Lizardmen, but they were driven back by Chaos; later, the High Elves from Ulthuan created a vortex to keep the demons at bay, and settled on most of the non-mountainous regions in the Old World. Since the region of soon-to-be-Bretonnian is the only Old World region closest to Ulthuan([[Athel Loren|that and because the Elves' favorite tree friend lives in that region as well]]), it was colonized the most, and its capital city in the Old World: '''Tor Alessi''' (soon to be '''L'Anguille''') was built there for the Elves to govern their other Old World's settlements from there. But then the <s>[[War of the Beard]]</s> War of Vengeance happened, and the land became a major battlefield between the Dwarves and High Elves. The conflict weakened the High Elves so much that '''Caradryel''', the successor Phoenix King, ordered the retreat of all High Elves back to Ulthuan. Some High Elves refused, and moved in to live with their aforementioned tree friends' forest and became the [[Wood Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|Wood Elves]]. With no Elves in sight, humans began to settle the land. It was first inhabited by some pagan hippies who play with rocks(aka pacifist tribe who worships '''[[Rhya]]'''). Then the Bretonnian's ancestor: The '''Bretonni''' tribe, arrived to their future homeland after fighting through the [[Worlds Edge Mountains]] against a bunch of Greenskins and other rival human tribes, and conquered the aforementioned pansy-pacifist tribe. These Bretonni were of similar martial prowess to the Unberogen (Sigmar's tribe), who fought both humans and orcs on daily basis and managed to avoid going extinct. Like every human tribe, the Bretonni were given an invitation by Sigmar to be [[the Empire|united as a whole]], but they refused and chose to keep to themselves because they were pretty much a mockery of the real-life French stereotype and believed through sheer arrogance that their culture was inherently superior. Seriously, the Bretonni are a backward medieval stasis tribe that couldn't even evolve to use metalwork without consulting Dwarves who lived in nearby mountains.

The Bretonni were later raided by a clusterfuck of nearby Orc WAAARGH, in addition to Tomb kings led by [[Settra the Imperishable|Settra]](who was after the lost shiny bling stolen from his kingdom). Unable to properly unite to face the threats, the Bretonnis were facing annihilation (much thanks to the sheer arrogance towards Sigmar that led to their doom). But an awesome guy named '''Giles Le Breton''' rallied every Bretonni warrior he could find, including his best friends Duke '''Thierulf d'Lyonesse''' and Duke '''Landuin d'Mousillon''', to fight the Orc menace. Still, they failed due to the horde's size and were forced to retreat to a nearby forest. Wandering wearily in the forest, Giles stopped to drink from a lake and found himself watched over by a strange woman of ethereal form: the Lady of the Lake. Le Breton, facing desperation and madness, asked this Lady to bless him with strength and he was fully restored. Duke Thierulf d'Lyonesse and Duke Landuin d'Mousillon did the same thing, and the three of them became <s>Lileath's puppet</s> the first three Grail Knights.

With the power to finally pull some awesome ass-kicking, Giles and his tribe kicked the shit out of the [[Orcs]], returned to their settlement, united the Bretonni tribesmen under one banner, and founded "Bretonnia," with their benefactor the Lady of the Lake as the centre of their newly created society.

After the unification, Breton was dubbed the "Uniter" and became the first Royarch. Unfortunately, Breton was killed (or we thought) by a cunning git with SpearChukas in one of his many campaigns against the Greenskin. His son '''Louis the Rash''' was then crowned the king, and founded the Questing Knight tradition. Many evils like the Tomb Kings and Greenskins were pushed out of the borders of Bretonnia during this time.

There were invasions from Araby where they invaded '''Estalia'''. Estalia were desperate, so they sought help from Bretonnia and many Empire provinces. A combined holy crusade of Bretonnia and the Empire was formed to kick them back to their sandy home.

After that, a joint army of undead led by '''[[Heinrich Kemmler]]''' and '''[[Krell]]''' plus the Skaven invaded but was crushed after the Skaven ran away with their tails between their legs in the middle of the fight.

During the End Times, it was revealed that the Lady of the Lake was indeed the elven goddess [[Lileath]]. The Bretonnians present during this revelation abandoned her, but through some convoluted nonsense <s>all Grail Knights and Damsels are saved in a new World, the "Haven" and probably live untainted from chaos as immortal rulers of a new Bretonnia (HURRAH!). BUT Bel'akor found out and smothered it in its crib, dooming everyone in there (hurroo...).</s> It was later mentioned that they may have simply lost contact with this Haven, as the Warhammer World was becoming increasingly saturated with Chaos.

==Geography==
The Kingdom of Bretonia is located to the West of the Empire with the Grey Mountains acting as a natural border between the two. Located to the East of Bretonia and West of the Grey Mountains lies the forest of Athel Loren, inhabited by the Wood Elves. They enjoy coming and murdering peasants in Quenelles every Springtime. South of Bretonia is [[Estalia]] and the Vaults Mountain Range. To the West of Bretonia is the Great Ocean and Ulthuan. To the North is the Island of Albion and Norsca.

Within the Kingdom itself lie multiple dukedoms. These are each ruled by a Duke, who has to have at least become a Knight of the Realm.

* '''Couronne''' - Located to the North of Bretonia and bordering the Wasteland and the Sea of Claws. Its lands lend themselves to horse-breeding, and has the best horses in all of Bretonia, no mean feat. Due to being more horse crazy than a [[Furry]] at a brony con, even the peasants ride horses, even if they don't own them per se. Currently the ruling Dukedom of Bretonia.
**'''Castle Couronne''' – The ducal capital of Couronne, famous for being the capital and seat of power of Louen Leoncoeur, current Royarch of Bretonnia. Also host to Brettonia's most famous tournament grounds, The Lion Ring, where nobles race their horses and participate in jousts and melee. Also home to the largest temple of Shallya, which houses a healing spring inside.

* '''L'Anguille''' - Bordering Couronne and Lyonesse, it is one of the smallest Dukedoms. Known primarily for coastal trade. There are no cities beyond Castle L'Anguille, as both Castle L'Anguille and Castle Couronne are so close so as to be impossible to compete with.
**'''Castle L'Anguille''' – Originally founded by the High Elves back when they were colonising the Old World, and originally called Tor Alessi. The most impressive and enduring building from this time is the Great Lighthouse, which rises to be 300 feet tall. The main castle itself lies on an island in the middle of the harbour.

* '''Lyonesse''' - This Dukedom lies upon the north-western shores of Bretonnia. One of the larger Dukedoms following its annexation of Mousillon several centuries earlier, the lands of Lyonesse are infamously known for their rivalry with not other Bretonnian realms, but amongst their own nobility. The main divide in Lyonen politics is that between the north and the south. Whilst the southern nobles were happy to be liberated from the rule of the mad and bloodthirsty Dukes of Mousillon, they were less happy when the Lyonen claimed many prime fiefs and proceeded to keep the “Old Mousillese” out of the corridors of power. Any attempts to work as a bloc are undermined by the feuds that exist between the Old Mousillese, but they do believe that they should work together to claim their rightful place.
**'''Castle Lyonnesse''' – One of the smallest Ducal Capitals in Brettonia, it is built into the walls of the very coast itself. According to folk tales, the inhabitants angered Mannan, who proceeded to flood the city leaving only the castle of the virtuous lord intact. Whatever the truth held in the story, adventurers have found ruins and golden items on the surrounding coast.

* '''Mousillon''' - A former Dukedom that has now been mostly absorbed into Lyonesse. It is the smallest and poorest of Brettonia's Dukedoms. It is filled with swamps and bogs, and the inhabitants are mainly inbred mutants. The Dukedom has become a haven for Vampires, witches, and other ne'er-do-wells who prey on the remaining peasantry. Currently unofficially ruled by Mallobaude.

* '''Artois''' - The only Dukedom to be completely covered in forest, Artois has a bit of a [[furry|Beastmen]] problem. It is common for newly anointed Knights of the Realm to be given a large portion of land in Artois. If they succeed in taming it, a new bastion has been established against the chaotic braying hordes. If not, then nothing of value was really lost. As a result, there are large amounts of ruins dotting the forest landscape.
**'''Castle Artois''' – Notable for being the only Ducal Capital without an accompanying city/village surrounding it. The building is simply a large fortress, used as a staging post by the Duke to return to after hunting beastmen.

* '''Gisoreux''' - This Dukedom lies within the treacherous slopes of the Pale Sisters and upon the low woodlands of the Arden Forest. Unlike in other parts of Bretonnia, where much of the land is one type of landscape and one type of people, the diversity in the geography of this Dukedom has also created diversity in cultures and customs. Those living within the arable plains to the south contain the typical farmers and peasants that are universal within all the realms. To the east, the lands are filled with harsh woodlands, where different people live life as expert trappers and wild woodsmen. Finally, to the north, those people that can eke out a living within the Pale Sisters are seasoned mountaineers who can brave harsh conditions.
**'''Castle Gisoreux''' – The city of Gisoreux is a busy place filled with traders and travellers. There are more Imperial merchants in Gisoreux than in any other city in Bretonnia, and it may be the only place in the world where people do not immediately think of sailors when they think of Marienburg; a number of land traders come from the Wasteland through the Gisoreux Gap. The city has fine merchant houses pressed right up against decaying slums, many of which used to be fine merchant houses. For some reason, merchant families in Gisoreux rarely maintain their prosperity for more than one generation. The castle itself is currently almost entirely abandoned, as the ruling Duke spends most of his time in Couronne. Only one wing is currently inhabited by the Duke's Steward.
**''' The Gisoreux Gap''' - One of only three locations within the entire Grey Mountains that allow passage between Bretonnia and the Empire.

* '''Bordeleaux''' - Known as the largest exporter of wines within the entire Kingdom, Bordeleaux is a beautiful land filled with many farms and vineyards. Such is the Dukedom's reputation for wine that even peasants and nobles alike are given the luxury of drinking it on a consistent basis. Being one of the few coastal Dukedoms, Bordeleaux has also a tradition of seafaring similar to L'Anguille. This has resulted in fierce competition over the sea trade and sea routes that link the large port-cities together, such as Marienburg and Erengrad to the north and Barak Varr and the Tilea city-states to the south. Unlike L'Anguille, the coastline is not treacherous to navigate, and as such many small cities and villages also act as trading ports.
**'''Castle Bordeleaux''' – A vast and rich city filled with almost every nationality in the Old World. It contains the First Chapel, the holiest of sites in the cult of the Lady. However, the most important temple to the Bordeliens is that of Manann, which is not exactly in the city. Rather, it is housed in an enormous ship, permanently moored near the entrance to the harbour. It is exposed to storms, but the priests say that Manann protects it, and it has survived for many years. Worshippers travel out by boat, and if possible they are supposed to help row or sail across. Grail Knights, Damsels and Prophetesses of the Lady are forbidden to set foot on board. Duke Alberic, the current Duke, is the first Duke of Bordeleaux in generations to visit the temple.

* '''Aquitaine''' - A pretty peaceful kingdom in the big scheme of things, and actually a pretty nice place to live in the Warhammer world. It is nothing but rolling hills and farms, punctuated with small woods and small castles of the nobility. It hasn't got any internal invaders like Orcs or Beastmen, and as such on the whole is a pretty nice place. This lack of external enemies has caused the leading nobility to turn to internal division, with small battles and wars being constant with the feuding of the leading knights. With no natural defences or trade routes, the dukedom itself doesn't have much in the way of riches or extremely defensible areas.
**'''Castle Aquitaine''' – A fairly small Ducal capital. It is famous for the Lace Tower, a tall spire built with so many windows that it looks as though it is made from stone lace. Uniquely amongst the capitals of Bretonnia, Castle Aquitaine is in fact the second keep to bear its name, standing exactly twelve miles from the ruins of the original fortress. The old castle had been used by the Red Duke, and when he was defeated King Louis the Righteous ordered the old castle razed and a new fortress-city built far away from the original site.

* '''Bastonne''' - Bastonne was at one time the very heart of all Bretonnia, its founding Duke being none other than Gilles le Breton, first Royarch of Bretonnia. It is in many ways the spiritual heart of the Kingdom, for the Cathedral of the Cult of the Lady is situated within the walls of Castle Bastonne. It is also said that the Sacred Lake where Gilles and his Companions first met the Lady, can be found somewhere deep within Bastonne's Forest of Châlons. The Chapel of Bastonne also houses the very codes of chivalry created by Gilles' son, Louis the Rash.
**'''Castle Bastonne''' – The town has the feel of somewhere preserved for the pilgrim trade, and it is a very popular destination. Peasant pilgrims are guided to the outside of a number of significant locations and to the inside of taverns that pay the guide a cut. Nobles can expect a personal tour, including opportunities to pray within most places. At a minimum, visiting nobles go to Gilles' personal Grail Chapel, and almost all Grail Knights have visited it at least once. The largest revered structure is the Water Tower in Castle Bastonne. This was reputedly Gilles' personal residence. Most nobles are not allowed to go beyond the entrance lobby, and peasants can be whipped for looking at it too much.
**'''Black Chasm''' - A giant hole in the ground, from which mysterious vapours rise periodically. Home to the [[Skaven]] of Clan Pestilens, it is here that they released the Red Pox onto the kingdom of Brettonia. Currently, the Skaven are stuck in a war between Clan Pestilens and Clan Flem against Clans Eshin and Moulder for control of the pit and any treasures that lay within.

* '''Montfort''' - the Dukedom of Montfort acts as the central buffer state between the lands of Bretonnia and those within the Empire of Man. Almost all of Montfort lies within the Grey Mountains, with what little arable land being devoted totally to agriculture.
**'''Castle Montfort''' – This Ducal capital guards the Brettonian end of Axe Bite Pass. It displays one of the finest examples of fortification within the Old World, five tiers of stone walls guard the pass at the western-most end, another just slightly smaller fortress-garrison town sits at the pass's eastern end as well. The city is primarily a trade centre charging a toll upon all who enter through the gates of the pass, going both ways, even its own citizens. It is claimed Montfort's original foundation was Dwarfen, abandoned either during or soon after the War of the Beard.
**'''Axe Bite Pass''' – At either end of the sheer-sided valley stands a mighty fortress, spanning the gap. On the Bretonnian side is Castle Montfort; on the Empire side is Helmgart. Countless battles have been fought in the valley between the two castles.

* '''Parravon''' - Forming one of the three ducal barriers between the lands of the Empire and other Ducal lands, Parravon commands the southern territories centred around the Grey Lady Pass, one of three routes that allow trade between Bretonnia and the Empire. Just like the Dukedoms of Montfort and Gisoreux, the Dukedom of Parravon lies almost exclusively upon the rocky peaks of the southern Grey Mountains, with what little flatland being devoted to agriculture. As such, many of Parravon's castles are built upon cliffs and peaks amongst the mountain range. Such a high altitude has ensured that Parravon is particularly noted for having a large number of Pegasi and Pegasus Knights amongst their ranks. In fact, they are known for their founding Duke befriending Glorfinial, lord and sire of all Royal Pegasus.
**'''Castle Parravon''' – Famous for being carved directly from the rock of the mountain, Parravon is the only city in Bretonnia with a substantial population of Dwarfs. There are now some Dwarf families who have lived there for generations, though they still keep themselves somewhat apart from the Human citizens. Bretonnia’s sumptuary laws state only nobles can use stone in buildings. However, the Dukes of Parravon have never wanted wooden buildings messing up their glorious city, so they have long maintained that a peasant living in a carved stone building is no different from a peasant living in a cave. Actually, given the quality of many peasant homes in Parravon, the difference really is minimal.

* '''Quenelles''' - Quenelles is the largest of the dukedoms of Bretonnia, stretching over most of the middle of the land. Between the Massif Orcal and the River Gilleau is a part of the Forest of Châlons. This area seems almost completely free of monsters: one or two small groups of Beastmen or Orcs are seen in a year. Small groups of hunters, charcoal burners, or woodsmen can work in the forest unmolested. All attempts to establish villages have failed, ending in the complete destruction of the village. [[Wood_Elves_(Warhammer_Fantasy)|The village is replaced, overnight, by a bare depression in the soil, as if something had scooped up the entire settlement and taken it away.]] The southwest of Quenelles was once, before the founding of Bretonnia, the land of Cuileux. The knights of Cuileux were wiped out by Goblins and their lands absorbed by Quenelles. However, the courage of the last stand of the Cuilen has made them legendary. A large area is known as the Grave of Cuileux and is not farmed.
**'''Castle Quenlles''' – The City of Quenelles sits right on the border of Athel Loren. Indeed, the walls do not guard the eastern edge of the city: instead, the walls run up to the trees and stop. A broad stone road runs along the border of the forest. This used to be the eastern wall, but it was cut down over a thousand years ago at the command of the Wood Elves.
**'''Massif Orcal''' – A large desolate place that only Greenskins call home. Ruined watchtowers dot the landscape. No mineral wealth or plants grow on this desolate place.

* '''Brionne''' - Being surrounded by powerful allies and far away from major threats, Brionne is famous for its beautiful and tranquil landscape, second only to its brethren within Aquitaine itself. Brionne is famous for its emphasis on making everything, from mighty castles to small towns as clean and beautiful as possible. [[Derp|This beauty comes at the cost of practicality and common sense. They build mighty castles are beautiful in style but horrible at their purpose.]]
**'''Castle Brionne''' – Unlike the rest of Brionne, the architects of this castle combined beauty with functionality, being incredibly aesthetically pleasing whilst also good at its job of being a fort. It also contains the Hall of Minstrels, a building with perfect acoustics that always has minstrels performing no matter the time of day or night.

* '''Carcassone''' - A highly marshalled Dukedom, even in comparison to other Bretonnian Dukedoms, Carcassonne is a heavily militarized land that focuses its efforts on eradication of the Greenskin tribes that infest the Irrana Mountains in its southern border, especially the Iron Orcs, a subspecies of Orc even tougher than Black Orcs but stupider than Savage Orcs, who have iron armor as a part of their body.
**'''Castle Carcassone''' – Castle Carcassonne stands on an island surrounded by the River Songez, the westernmost of the tributaries of the River Brienne that lie wholly within the dukedom. The attached town is small and exists to provide services to a large number of "[[Dogs_of_War|shepherd]]" companies who come to the castle to take jobs with the Duke.

==Culture==
[[Knight|KNIGHTS]]. Want something besides knights? BETTER KNIGHTS. Seriously. If there was a culture in the Old World that was more of a one-trick pony, (HA!) then the Bretonnians would probably declare a crusade for cramping their style. Bretonnian culture is all about fancy soldiers on fancy horses making fancy war. Based on the WHFRPG splatbook on the place, Bretonnia loves horses more than is strictly sane. Even peasants at least know how to ride and there's an entire sub-breed of horses designed to be easily ridden and cheaply fed, like a medieval Honda Civic. One of the most common punishments for nobles who manage to commit a crime serious enough for anyone to care is to be forced to ride in a carriage rather than on a horse like a manly man.

Outside of horses and the people with sharp metal that ride them, pretty much any French stereotype you can think of will probably be accurate aside from and surrendering. They like fancy cheese, they like wine, big on romantic themes and they never use one vowel when five will work. The splatbook also says they like truffles. So much so that they breed a special truffle hound for finding them. There's a highly suspect bit (from the 2e Warhammer RPG sourcebook on Bretonnia) that says that once a Bretonnian truffle hound gets a taste of some, he'll go psycho-territorial and try to bite off the junk of anyone nearby. Sadly no game rules exist (yet) to allow Emperor Karl Franz to lose his Sausage of Sigmar to a horny dog.

Ironically, Bretonnians actually changed quite drastically between editions before being all but abandoned. The original rendition of Bretonnians, before they became the "Chivalric Romance Knights In Shining Armor" faction was basically the French under Louis XVI - incredibly corrupt, self-centred aristocrats (with a massive problem with [[Slaanesh]] cults) ruling over dirty, downtrodden peasants. And, well, the abysmal lot of the peasants remained, but the aristocrats themselves got polished up brighter, to try and present a more sympathetic/heroic interpretation of them. Further, with the introduction of the [[Herrimault]] (aka Merrymen), you essentially have men in <s>tights</s> [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G59JnM4JKNQ&t=1s <s>TIGHT tights</s>]] ''hoodies'' running around fucking the more tyrannical nobles, that is, except when Chaos comes around, at which point Robin Hood fights alongside King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. Just long enough to avoid execution, presumably by truffle hound.

Aside from being strictly feudal, the biggest difference between Bretonnians and the Empire is that the Bretons worship mainly a single deity; the [[Lady of the Lake]], a mystical woman who gave their first ruler the power to forge the united kingdom of Bretonnia. They do pay homage to other gods and in fact, have the seat of power of the cult of Shallya, it's just that those gods are significantly less important and are only called upon when the Bretonnians need something from them. Editions have insinuated to varying degrees that the Lady of the Lake may, in fact, actually be a Wood Elf mage and that the Wood Elves are secretly manipulating the entire Bretonnian culture to use them as expendable pawns. This is why, for example, they are subtly biased against the higher technologies used in the Empire, which would make them more inclined to cut down [[Athel Loren]] for firewood.

Their honor code has been used against them many times in battle one example is how in contrast to their neighbors they cannot under any circumstances use mercenaries (though Carcassonne nobles in particular are known for hiring entire regiments of "shepherds" to protect a single sheep...). And how promises done in a duel must be kept. One example of the duel rule backfiring on them is the story of Calard of Garamont long story short his fiance was defiled by a Norscan warlord and in arrogance the knights bet on who would keep the half norscan child. The knights lost and they gave away the child to the norscans [[derp|granting the slaves of chaos a claim on bretonnian lands]].

==Knightly Hierarchy==
*'''Knights Errant:''' You thought you started your career as being a squire? Nope. Nobles who are old enough to wear their armour and sit on a horse are designated as Knights Errant and told to go off and earn glory however they can. Usually by dying. Of course, a few Knights Errant manage to survive, which earns them the rank of...
*'''Knights of the Realm:''' Your basic knight. Someone who's gotten some combat experience and respect already, they're given a bit of land to look after and some peasants to work it. This is often as far as anyone will go, unless they're obscenely rich or lucky, in which case they become...
**'''Pegasus Knights''': Though not technically higher in rank than Knights of the Realm, these guys are fuck-off rich/batshit crazy enough to afford/find and tame a giant, bloodthirsty flying horse instead of your garden variety land-bound kind. Bretonnians are not known to be exactly healthy when it comes to their love of horses, but it gets really insane with the winged ones: peasants can't even touch the animals, and one of the dukes actually killed any peasant that looked at his steed. Ferrari's owner bullshit all around, gentlemen!
*'''Questing Knights:''' For any number of reasons, a knight may give up all his lands and titles (like a [[Slayer]]), lay down his lance, vow to seek honour and greatness above all else (like a [[Slayer]]), and become a Questing Knight. These guys spend the next 10 years or so wandering around the world (like a [[Slayer]]), looking for the Lady of the Lake while slaying big, nasty stuff along the way (like a [[Slayer]]). Most die. Horribly, alone, and far from home (like a [[Slayer]]). Fortunately, they all carry giant weapons, mostly greatswords, so their death is guaranteed to have a minimum amount of win (like a [[Slayer]]). But, if they are skilled, heroic, and lucky enough, they can succeed in their quest (''unlike'' a [[Slayer]]); they find the correct Lake and meet the Green Knight. If they manage to defeat him (okay, he's holding back a lot), they get to see the Lady, drink some Powerthirst from the grail, and if they genuinely believe in the knightly ideals they claim to follow (drinking kills you otherwise), become...
*'''Grail Knights:''' The living gods of Bretonnia, they get to live for several hundred years and kick all kinds of ass. All kings have to drink from the grail, which means that unlike in '''other nations''' there is ''always'' a badass in charge. In fluff Grail knights can have all sorts of awesome powers, from killing evil creatures with a touch to healing wounds almost instantly, but on the table, all they get is magical attacks (except for the king, he also gets regeneration). Apparently, even their rotten and dried out corpses keeps some sort of magical powers and divine protection, considering that grail reliquae are a thing.

Questing Knights and Grail Knights are technically outside the usual hierarchy (with the exception of the Grail Knights who decide to regain all their titles after completing their quest, as all kings do) but, especially in the case of the latter, their word carries great weight, because they are closer to the Lady of the Lake than all others (with the exception of damsels and prophetesses of the lady, the magic-users of Bretonnia). Knights also tend to have a superiority complex that would put most high elves to shame, which means that no Questing Knight would allow himself to be directly led by a Knight of the Realm and Grail Knights only accept other Grail Knights as leaders (usually the king or a duke). Knights that actually deign to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with peasants are so rare they are considered exemplars of empathy.

Incidentally, there's only one restriction on being a Duke or lord of Bretonnia: you have to have proved yourself first. That is, you have to be at least a Knight of the Realm, but after that, it really doesn't matter. It's worth mentioning, too, that you don't inherit solely based on your parentage. If you're at least slightly capable, you'll inherit, but if a lord's son is a complete pussy, someone else will take over. This at least prevents the similar issues faced by planetary lords in the Imperium in 40k then, as this acts to weed out at least the worst of the worst (if not all the worst).

==Peasants==
{{Topquote|Thou shalt give unto thine glorious liege the taxes that he requires. Thou shalt labour all but feast days, and no more than a tenth-share shall you keep for kith and kin. Rejoice! For a knight of Bretonia provides your shield...|The Peasant's Duty}}

It's not easy being a [[peasant]] in Bretonnia. Peasants can only ever keep one-tenth of what they earn, which means that either peasants earn a lot or they are all, in fact, undead, which would explain their lack of skill at arms; otherwise they wouldn't have enough to sustain themselves. The other 90% goes to the Knights and Nobles, and any leftovers they have go back to the peasants. The splatbook for playing the first edition of the WHFB RPG in Bretonnia would go on to clarify this a little: as a peasant, your lord does indeed take 90% of your harvest, but then redistributes part of it back to you so you can survive (sort of). It's also said that some lords classify the harvest as 'weeding' meaning the peasants get to keep the 'weeds'. He's probably still going to give you just enough to survive and don't think just because you grew something really nice he's not just going to give you a bag of low-quality grain and some knight spit to cook it in. So basically feudalism with a nice big flavouring of Stalin-era socialism. The reason for this "Giving nine-tenths of everything you grow to your lord" lore error actually comes from a myth of the real-life Medieval peasantry (the reality was closer to one-tenth, and even that still left people mostly starving), which has been perpetuated by [[Games Workshop|people who don't fucking check their sources, or bother to apply logic or reason to anything they read.]]

If you are a peasant, you also live in complete filth with other peasants in disgusting holdings and you can't ever change your miserable position. But hey, things are not so bad, you can always join your Lord's men-at-arms and receive enough shinies to set you for life! Or so they told you at the time, but they forgot to mention that you had to pay for all your equipment, so you were left with squat. Still, if you work hard enough, you might become a yeoman, which may earn you the privilege of riding the retarded/maimed horses no noble would dare to look at.

Naturally, under such conditions, many peasants simply snap. Some become bandits, but those who do not wish to be hunted down for the rest of their likely short lives instead find a ragtag band of other loonies, a dead grail knight and a pointy stick to become pilgrims, hoping to earn the blessing of the Lady (usually reserved only for nobles) by fighting for truth, justice and the Bretonnian way while carrying the dead knight around. If there is no dead grail knight around, I am sure that one over there won't recover from his wounds... (don't confound them for flagellants though. Pilgrims are known to cause unrest and be coward enough to run when things look really bad, so they are not as fanatical as they want for you to believe)

The 2nd edition [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]] splatbook dedicated to Bretonnia, "Knights of the Grail", provides a lot more of a look at the peasant lifestyle, and expands upon the details a lot. In particular, because peasants (often quite rightly) don't trust their local lords not to resolve peasant disputes in the most brutally expedient manner possible, they tend to cover up their problems and try to resolve them purely amongst themselves. This usually works, but it also reinforces the fiction that the peasants actually are a happy, contented lot who live idyllic lives... aka, the complete rubbish that the vast majority of Bretonnian nobles genuinely believe because they've been spoonfed that crap their whole lives. When peasant revolts ''do'' happen, and we're told they're not that rare, this contributes to why the nobles put them down so harshly; because the uprising only happens as a last resort when the peasants just can't take it anymore, the nobles usually have no idea ''why'' it's happening - to them, it just sees to come out of nowhere, and this supports their narrative that peasant uprisings are caused by greed or base ingratitude.

Ironically, although the nobles typically blame foreign agitators for these outbursts of revolutionary sentiment, the truth is that the most common cause (other than just the nobles being assholes) is... nobles stirring up the peasants of a rival noble's land to distract their forces so the agitating noble can more easily conquer their rival. It's actually noted that foreign powers who ''do'' want to weaken Bretonnia have far more effective means than just agitating a bunch of feeble peasants. [[Chaos]] likes to stick a tentacle in when it has the opportunity, and Chaos-backed revolts are noted as extremely dangerous, far more so than usual - ordinary peasants may easily fall before the armoured might of Bretonnian knights, but a vengeful horde of mutants, often supplemented by [[beastmen]] and [[warlock]]s? That's a whole different story! Undead invaders use armies, magic, turn peasants and nobles into vampires or "recruit" dead Bretonnians to fight for them.

Technically the King or the Fay Enchantress, the hot female pope of the Lady, can raise you to nobility, but this has only happened thrice in all history of Bretonnia and your children will still be peasants. The first was a peasant named Huebald who saved a noblewoman from Beastmen; he was killed in his first battle because pretentious nobles will dislike the upstart and arranged him to die. The second was [[Repanse de Lyonesse]] AKA Joan of Ark. The third was a farmer's son named Geg, who avoided Huebald's fate by being the only peasant to ever drink from the Lady’s Grail to become a Grail Knight, making other nobles know when to quit.

==Suddenly, Total War==
{{topquote|When the clarion call is sounded, I will ride out and fight in the name of Liege and Lady. Whilst I draw breath the lands bequeathed unto me will remain untainted by evil. Honor is all, chivalry is all. Rejoice, for we, the Knights of Bretonnia, will be your shield.|Knight's vow}}
{{topquote|I set down my lance, symbol of duty. I spurn those I love. I relinquish all and take up the tools of my quest. No obstacle will stand before me. No plea of help shall find me waiting. No moon will look upon me twice lest I be judged idle. I give my body, heart and soul to the Lady whom I seek.|Questing vow}}
{{topquote|That which is sacrosanct I shall preserve. That which is sublime I will protect. That which threatens I will destroy. For my holy wrath will know no bounds.|Grail vow}}
Damn good writing.

Ahem, although the Bretonnians got [[squat]]ted twice over (first by being removed from the game, and then by [[Age of Sigmar | the entire game being removed from the game]]), they've recently got a new lease on life from their appearance in [[Total War: WARHAMMER]], where they're not only playable, but also get entirely new units that they never had in tabletop, including Hippogryph Knights, Blessed Trebuchets loaded with holy water, and Foot Squires. Even better, they have an awesome campaign that discourages mindless empire-building and instead rewards you with points of Chivalry for being a gallant Lady-fearing crusader. Every non-legendary lord must take up one by one all the aforementioned vows if they want the Grail. Want immortality, perfect vigor and your nifty divine powers? Earn it.

==UNSQUATTED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD==
[[File:New Bretonnia.jpg|thumb|300px|right|FOR ZE LADY WE RIDE AGAIN!]]
After an update, it has been confirmed that Bretonnia will be making its glorious return in [[Warhammer: The Old World]]. The setting will be taking place during the time of King Louen Orc Slayer, who ruled around the time of The Age of Three Emperors. Knights and dirty peasantry rejoice for the lands of Bretonnia are making their glorious comeback!

In a recent (and long overdue) update for The Old World some pieces of art were shown off, and among them was a picture of a dirty peasant bowman and a less dirty Knight of the Realm, both wearing the heraldry of Lord Gastille who seems to have been duke of Brionne at some point during the last 100(ish) years of the Age of the Three Emperors (you can see his heraldry on the Bretonnia map). The artwork looks pretty good and shows that Bretonnia is staying true to it's chivalrous roots and aesthetic.

==Of Knights, Lore, And Major Retcons==
For all that recent lore has Bretonnia as a place where being a peasant means you exist at the pleasure of the local nobility and can never hope to rise higher in life, this wasn't always the case. The 5th Edition Army Book, in addition to introducing the Lady Of The Lake, described becoming a knight as something that ''anyone'' could do provided they followed the ancient Bretonnian custom by which they earned it. Any area that needed a knight to protect it would designate a "perilous task" that the would-be knight had to complete, most likely involving the death of some local monster that had been eating people and causing a ruckus.

This task was traditionally chosen by "the fairest maiden in the village", who was destined to marry the one who succeeded at her task. Any brave or reckless youth was allowed to attempt it, with the volunteer being dubbed a Knight Errant and equipping themselves as best they can with whatever arms and armour they can beg, borrow, or scrounge. If they succeeded they were made a Knight of the Realm, gifted with the best armour and finest warhorse the village could afford (which, judging by the models, would make any Brettonian village ridiculously rich by real-life Medieval standards), along with lordship over the village itself and whatever lands and castle were considered part of it to defend as their own property.

There are several interesting details about this system, such as how Knights Errant are not technically knights; a Knight Errant is not a true knight, but an aspirant, the title meaning they're trying to become a knight by accepting an errand to complete. This leads directly to the tradition of the Errantry War when the king declares open season on a particular enemy and the war itself becomes an errand. Because you usually only get the chance to become a knight when your village doesn't currently have a knight, an Errantry War is a great opportunity for ambitious peasants and noble scions alike to seek knighthood, as well as a good way to raise a big army very quickly.

Of course, this also makes an Errantry War into a double-edged sword, because you have to give out the knighthoods afterwards. [[Roman Empire|If you haven't conquered enough land to go around...well, you're in a lot of trouble.]] So kings don't declare Errantry Wars very often. And, of course, to make sure there are “openings” for knighthood the peasants aren’t going to miss the fact there are too many knights already...

Another interesting detail is that the Bretonnian system of knighthood was functionally meritocratic, with knighthood something you achieved by completing an errand rather than inheriting the position. A lord's sons start out as Knights Errant and have an advantage over most peasants because they probably have access to much better training and equipment, but even so, they still have to follow the rule. No errand means no knighthood and no domain.

The system essentially worked from the bottom up, with the village as the basic unit of social organisation, and in many ways, you became a knight through social consensus. The person who succeeds at the errand is probably going to be the person with community support because the village provided the weapons, equipment, and other essential aid he needed to complete his errand. A knight was essentially a village champion, with the next level up being a champion chosen from among the knights, then you build another champion on top of them, and so on until you reached the King.

In this sense it would probably be fair to characterise 5th edition Bretonnia as a meritocratic aristocracy. You ascend to the aristocracy by performing errands, and if you were born to a noble family but fail to complete an errand then sorry, son, you're not a noble. While not perfect, the close association of the knight with the village probably helped to safeguard against abusive knights as well.

After all, who sets the errand? Who decides who the 'fairest maiden' is, and how does she decide what to do? What stops a village from agreeing to set a suicidal task if they hated the foremost candidates for knighthood, waited for those candidates to get killed and then set an easier one for the guy they liked?

Even the identification of a particular maiden as 'the fairest' had to do with social consensus. It's entirely possible that the potential knight and the maiden are already a couple and the system is gamed ahead of time. You don't get knighted by an existing knight, a lord, or the king, the whole system hinged on the local community.

Lastly, the knightly errand system made Bretonnia into what is essentially a land of D&D adventurers with a culture that puts a strong emphasis on individual heroism, serving as a nice contrast to the Empire. If you want social success, then you just had to go kill a monster! There were also no rules about how the errand is completed or any judges watching you, so it's entirely possible to complete the errand through cleverness.

Of course, [[Games Workshop]] didn't think that was [[grimdark]] enough, and for Sixth Edition decided to flip the system on its head so that instead of rising from the bottom up, it hangs down and drips faeces all over everyone unlucky enough to live at the bottom. [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]]'s [[Splatbook | Knights of the Grail]] follows the 6th edition model and provided a strict legal definition of nobility codified by Louis the Rash, the second king of Bretonnia. He made a big list of names called the Peer List: if your family name was on the list you were noble, and if all your ancestors in three generations were nobles then you were a noble, [[Nazi|but even one peasant would disqualify you.]] That means that even if ennobled peasant marries a noble, their children would still be peasants.
In theory, all Bretonnian nobles should be able to trace their lineage back to the List, and while the king has the power to add a name to the List, he has only done so three times in all of Bretonnia's recorded history. No word on how exactly Bretonnia has even survived to this day considering how dangerous a life of a knight is.
In stark opposition to the egalitarian system of 5E based on deeds, 6E Bretonnian nobility is purely a matter of ancestry. Nobles then claim fiefs and rule over villages, but are not required to interact with them in any way, and the village has no power over them.

In 5E, the knight springs from the people. In 6E, the knight dominates the people. Aren't [[retcon]]s [[Rage | nice]]?

As things stand, it mostly depends on whoever is the Lord who holds suzerainty over the village in question and in most cases it's somewhere in-between. It's also very likely that at least some people dodged the Peer List requirement over the years (it's not like anyone can tell perfectly after all the time that has passed) and got nobility and it just doesn't get exposed because not everyone is inclined to become a Questing Knight (Grail Knighthood cannot be loopholed, the Lady knows whether you are a true noble son of Bretonnia or not).

That said, looking at the 2e supplement for the RPG shows a more nuanced take. While greedy or corrupt nobles absolutely exist, most Duke are fairly reasonable, and anyone that completed the Grail Vow is a nice person who genuinly wants what's best for the peasantry... but cannot relate to them and treat them with paternalistic condescending compassion.

==Oldhammer Oddities==
Bretonnia debuted for the very first time in the 3rd edition of [[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]], making them one of the youngest [[human]] factions - for comparion's sake, the [[Amazon]]s and [[Cathay]] debuted in 2nd edition, whilst [[Norsca]], [[Araby]] and [[Nippon]] all hailed back to 1st edition. The only other human factions to debut this late in the game where [[Tilea]] and [[Estalia]].

At this point, Bretonnia had something of a dichotomy. The lore presented in the corebook presents them as something of a pre-French Revolution hellhole, where a spoiled and vainglorious king rules over decadent aristocrats whilst the benighted peasantry struggles to survive - this is the lore that [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]] 1st edition would also include, though it never visited the region.

The Grand Army of Bretonnia in ''Warhammer Armies'', on the other hand, is almost like something out of the [[Arthurian Mythos]], being made up of [[knight]]s and peasants. A female Bretonnian hero could ride a [[Unicorn]] and any Bretonnian hero could ride a [[dragon]] (either flightless or winged), but apart from those and the presence of war altars and cannons, it was basically just knights and peasants with very, ''very'' French names. They could supplement their armies by taking [[Halflings (Warhammer)|Halflings]], [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Old Worlders]] and [[Wood Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|Wood Elves]] as allies and [[Dwarfs (Warhammer Fantasy)|Dwarfs]], [[Half-Orc]]s, [[Norsca|Norse]], [[Ogre Kingdoms|Ogres]] and [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Old Worlders]] as mercenaries, as well as take a monstrous host containing a [[dragon]], giant frogs, giant leeches, giant snails, and swarms of frogs and toads, though. though.

This interpretation didn't last long. Bretonnia went unvisited in 4th edition, but when it returned in 5th edition, it abandoned its corrupt and jaded lore for something far closer to the [[Arthurian Mythos]] its army had been built around. Whilst 6th edition would grimdark it back up, it'd still build from the 5e version of the lore, rather than the 3e version.

==Special Characters==
Whilst Bretonnia was introduced with a fairly sizable list of special characters in its 5th edition sourcebook, most of them didn't make it into subsequent editions.

* [[Louen Leoncoeur]], the Lionhearted
* [[Repanse de Lyonesse]]
* [[Baron Odo d'Outremer]], avec Suliman le Saracen
* [[Roland le Marechal]]
* [[Tancred]], Duc De Quenelles
* [[Betrand the Brigand]] and the Bowmen of Bergerac
* [[The Knight of the Perilous Lance]]
* [[Tristran le Troubadour]] avec Jules le Joungleur
* [[Reynard le Chasseur]]
* [[Armand D'Aquitaine]]
* [[Jasperre le Beau]], Dragonslayer
* [[Bohemond Beastslayer]], Duke of Bastonne
* [[The Green Knight]]
* [[Morgiana le Fay]], Fay Enchantress of Bretonnia

==Unique Fauna and Flora==
* [[Hagranym]]s
* [[Derelich]]
* [[Preyton]]
* [[Giant Snail]]
* [[Dracoleech]]
* [[Chasm Spawn]]
* [[Lakemen]]
* [[Iron Orcs]]

== Gallery ==
<gallery>
Games Workshop Hates France.jpeg|RIP Bretonnia, the Sisters shall never Forget
Part Deux.jpg|SUDDENLY
Britoinian Undead.jpg| SUDDENLY alternate
Map Bretonnia 6.jpg|You Are Here
Grail Reliquae Party.png|one of those Grail Pilgrims looks scruffier than the rest...It's the one holding the Lance.
File:TOW Bretonnian Knight.jpg
File:TOW Bretonnian Archer.jpg
</gallery>

==See Also==
* [[Warhammer/Tactics/Bretonnia|Tactics/Bretonnia]], in which we explain to you how to best bash skulls in, chaos warrior style, only from a horse.
* [[Warhammer/Tactics/6th_Edition/Bretonnia|Bretonnian tactics for the glorious 6th edition]]

== Links ==
* [https://courtofbretonnia.tumblr.com Court of Bretonnia] - a tumblrfaggot with a new, but good blog on Bretonnia.
* [http://fuckyeahbretonnia.tumblr.com FUCK YEAH BRETONNIA] - tumblrfaggot redeems self with a decent topical blog about Bretonnia.
* [http://www.roundtable-bretonnia.org/index.php The Roundtable of Bretonnia]
* [https://warhammerfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Bretonnia Warhammer Wiki - Bretonnia] - Dah Wikis
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60WQUG3XW3M Total War: Warhammer Bretonnia Trailer]

{{Regions and areas of the Old World}}
{{Playable Factions in Warhammer Fantasy Battle}}

[[Category:Warhammer Fantasy]]
[[Category:Bretonnia]][[Category:France]]

Bretonnia

2023-06-03T07:56:40Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711:

{{british}}
[[Image:Bretonnia Cover.png|thumb|300px|right|KNIGHTS KNIGHTS CHIVALRY HORSES KNIGHTS]]
{{topquote|Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright, that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong; that is your oath.|Godfrey of Ibelin, ''Kingdom of Heaven''}}
{{topquote|We have political systems like this in the Empire. We call them 'protection rackets'.|Matthias von Pfeildorf, former Imperial Envoy to Couronne.}}
{{topquote|Help! Help! I'm being repressed!|Dennis the Constitutional Peasant, Monty Python and the Holy Grail}}
{{topquote|I'm French! Why do you zink i 'ave zis outrageous accent?!|also Monty Python and the Holy Grail}}

'''Bretonnia''' is one of the main factions in [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]. It is a human nation roughly modelled on a combination of medieval France, a tiny pinch of England and every medieval tale of chivalry ever (especially the legends of King Arthur). At a glance, they could easily be [[Games Workshop]]'s least creative race, in any game, ever. And yes, that includes <s>[[Judge Dredd]]</s> [[Adeptus Arbites]]. One of their special characters is called [[The Green Knight]], and their goddess is the Lady of the Lake (later revealed to also be part of the Elven pantheon). Even the name of the kingdom is derived from Britannia (Roman Empire-ruled Britain) and Brittany (part of northwestern France). It's pretty lazy, all things considered.

However, it is still inventive in one way: In Bretonnia, the ideals of medieval chivalry and high honour is presented side-by-side with horrible, almost hilarious black-comedy level of oppressive government. The greatest heroic knights could also at the same time be the sort of charmer who worries about soiling their poulaines while stepping over starving peasant orphans, and your armies will be made of equal parts saintly knightly warriors and wretched peasants who get sent to die in droves in the name of feudal responsibilities. It's gotten to the point where a large part of the charm of Bretonnia is in its black comedy value, in terms of social commentary.

At least for some people anyway, and in a particular edition. Like with most Warhammer lore post-[[shitstorm|End Times]], there's a significant fan divide between which "version" of lore is best, with the main contenders for Bretonnia being 5th edition - written by Nigel Stillman - and 6th edition - written by Anthony Reynolds. Stillman's take on Bretonnia was significantly lighter than that of Reynolds, with a more generic Arthurian kingdom but lacking in what many called [[grimderp]] lore decisions by Reynolds; on the other hand, defenders of the latter say Stillman's was lacking in realism, and Reynolds' is more interesting. Basically, 5th edition fans argue 6th's tone is too dark and that's bad, while 6th edition fans argue 5th's tone is too bright and that's bad. It's an argument that's went on for over 15 years, until [[Fail|the entire army and country was eliminated in]] [[The End Times]], paving the way for [[Age of Sigmar]], where the faction still hasn't come back in any form as of 2023.

Bretonnian armies basically consist of [[knight]]s. Lots and lots of knights. And everyone, from the lowliest Knight Errant to the living-god Grail Knights, rides the same. Damn. Horse. Except for the ones that ride [[Pegasus|Pegasi]]. There are also some lowly, filthy peasants that support the knights (by which we mean they're ''very cost-effective'' meatshields).

The army is currently very old and very out of date, although still readily available, there are some rumours concerning them though. This is unfortunate since WFB 8th edition [[nerf]]ed cavalry pretty hard. They're still workable, but they're hurting pretty badly. Some denizens of /tg/ argue that Bretonnia should just be [[squat]]ted, as they don't have anything over any other army. Seriously, the Empire (ostensibly an infantry-based army) has better cavalry than these guys.

For what it's worth, they're still a major player in the fluff, arguably sharing the "protagonist" stage with the Empire (or at least being the co-star) in the Glottkin End Times book, though the plot material of "Thanquol" seems to have finally done in the nation as an independent entity.

As of March 26th, 2016, the entire Bretonnian range has been added to Games Workshop's 'Last Chance to Buy' section, so it seems like the Brets are finally gone for good. Though due to the aforementioned fading relevance as an army, lack of creativity and stand-out characters, some actually arguing for squatting, and all that even before the End Times and Age of Sigmar, few can honestly say they didn’t see this coming. Compared to [[Tomb Kings]], outrage over the loss seems to be rather lukewarm. But maybe this was because the Tomb Kings were the first to get axed, and one of GW's more creative races to boot, whereas the Bretonnians were designed by watching [[/tv/|Excalibur]] and moulding one horse. Some may say it's also because the Tomb Kings were more popular than the Brets but that's [[Skub|subjective]].

==History==
Long before the land now known as Bretonnia was founded, it was inhabited by the Lizardmen, but they were driven back by Chaos; later, the High Elves from Ulthuan created a vortex to keep the demons at bay, and settled on most of the non-mountainous regions in the Old World. Since the region of soon-to-be-Bretonnian is the only Old World region closest to Ulthuan([[Athel Loren|that and because the Elves' favorite tree friend lives in that region as well]]), it was colonized the most, and its capital city in the Old World: '''Tor Alessi''' (soon to be '''L'Anguille''') was built there for the Elves to govern their other Old World's settlements from there. But then the <s>[[War of the Beard]]</s> War of Vengeance happened, and the land became a major battlefield between the Dwarves and High Elves. The conflict weakened the High Elves so much that '''Caradryel''', the successor Phoenix King, ordered the retreat of all High Elves back to Ulthuan. Some High Elves refused, and moved in to live with their aforementioned tree friends' forest and became the [[Wood Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|Wood Elves]]. With no Elves in sight, humans began to settle the land. It was first inhabited by some pagan hippies who play with rocks(aka pacifist tribe who worships '''[[Rhya]]'''). Then the Bretonnian's ancestor: The '''Bretonni''' tribe, arrived to their future homeland after fighting through the [[Worlds Edge Mountains]] against a bunch of Greenskins and other rival human tribes, and conquered the aforementioned pansy-pacifist tribe. These Bretonni were of similar martial prowess to the Unberogen (Sigmar's tribe), who fought both humans and orcs on daily basis and managed to avoid going extinct. Like every human tribe, the Bretonni were given an invitation by Sigmar to be [[the Empire|united as a whole]], but they refused and chose to keep to themselves because they were pretty much a mockery of the real-life French stereotype and believed through sheer arrogance that their culture was inherently superior. Seriously, the Bretonni are a backward medieval stasis tribe that couldn't even evolve to use metalwork without consulting Dwarves who lived in nearby mountains.

The Bretonni were later raided by a clusterfuck of nearby Orc WAAARGH, in addition to Tomb kings led by [[Settra the Imperishable|Settra]](who was after the lost shiny bling stolen from his kingdom). Unable to properly unite to face the threats, the Bretonnis were facing annihilation (much thanks to the sheer arrogance towards Sigmar that led to their doom). But an awesome guy named '''Giles Le Breton''' rallied every Bretonni warrior he could find, including his best friends Duke '''Thierulf d'Lyonesse''' and Duke '''Landuin d'Mousillon''', to fight the Orc menace. Still, they failed due to the horde's size and were forced to retreat to a nearby forest. Wandering wearily in the forest, Giles stopped to drink from a lake and found himself watched over by a strange woman of ethereal form: the Lady of the Lake. Le Breton, facing desperation and madness, asked this Lady to bless him with strength and he was fully restored. Duke Thierulf d'Lyonesse and Duke Landuin d'Mousillon did the same thing, and the three of them became <s>Lileath's puppet</s> the first three Grail Knights.

With the power to finally pull some awesome ass-kicking, Giles and his tribe kicked the shit out of the [[Orcs]], returned to their settlement, united the Bretonni tribesmen under one banner, and founded "Bretonnia," with their benefactor the Lady of the Lake as the centre of their newly created society.

After the unification, Breton was dubbed the "Uniter" and became the first Royarch. Unfortunately, Breton was killed (or we thought) by a cunning git with SpearChukas in one of his many campaigns against the Greenskin. His son '''Louis the Rash''' was then crowned the king, and founded the Questing Knight tradition. Many evils like the Tomb Kings and Greenskins were pushed out of the borders of Bretonnia during this time.

There were invasions from Araby where they invaded '''Estalia'''. Estalia were desperate, so they sought help from Bretonnia and many Empire provinces. A combined holy crusade of Bretonnia and the Empire was formed to kick them back to their sandy home.

After that, a joint army of undead led by '''[[Heinrich Kemmler]]''' and '''[[Krell]]''' plus the Skaven invaded but was crushed after the Skaven ran away with their tails between their legs in the middle of the fight.

During the End Times, it was revealed that the Lady of the Lake was indeed the elven goddess [[Lileath]]. The Bretonnians present during this revelation abandoned her, but through some convoluted nonsense <s>all Grail Knights and Damsels are saved in a new World, the "Haven" and probably live untainted from chaos as immortal rulers of a new Bretonnia (HURRAH!). BUT Bel'akor found out and smothered it in its crib, dooming everyone in there (hurroo...).</s> It was later mentioned that they may have simply lost contact with this Haven, as the Warhammer World was becoming increasingly saturated with Chaos.

==Geography==
The Kingdom of Bretonia is located to the West of the Empire with the Grey Mountains acting as a natural border between the two. Located to the East of Bretonia and West of the Grey Mountains lies the forest of Athel Loren, inhabited by the Wood Elves. They enjoy coming and murdering peasants in Quenelles every Springtime. South of Bretonia is [[Estalia]] and the Vaults Mountain Range. To the West of Bretonia is the Great Ocean and Ulthuan. To the North is the Island of Albion and Norsca.

Within the Kingdom itself lie multiple dukedoms. These are each ruled by a Duke, who has to have at least become a Knight of the Realm.

* '''Couronne''' - Located to the North of Bretonia and bordering the Wasteland and the Sea of Claws. Its lands lend themselves to horse-breeding, and has the best horses in all of Bretonia, no mean feat. Due to being more horse crazy than a [[Furry]] at a brony con, even the peasants ride horses, even if they don't own them per se. Currently the ruling Dukedom of Bretonia.
**'''Castle Couronne''' – The ducal capital of Couronne, famous for being the capital and seat of power of Louen Leoncoeur, current Royarch of Bretonnia. Also host to Brettonia's most famous tournament grounds, The Lion Ring, where nobles race their horses and participate in jousts and melee. Also home to the largest temple of Shallya, which houses a healing spring inside.

* '''L'Anguille''' - Bordering Couronne and Lyonesse, it is one of the smallest Dukedoms. Known primarily for coastal trade. There are no cities beyond Castle L'Anguille, as both Castle L'Anguille and Castle Couronne are so close so as to be impossible to compete with.
**'''Castle L'Anguille''' – Originally founded by the High Elves back when they were colonising the Old World, and originally called Tor Alessi. The most impressive and enduring building from this time is the Great Lighthouse, which rises to be 300 feet tall. The main castle itself lies on an island in the middle of the harbour.

* '''Lyonesse''' - This Dukedom lies upon the north-western shores of Bretonnia. One of the larger Dukedoms following its annexation of Mousillon several centuries earlier, the lands of Lyonesse are infamously known for their rivalry with not other Bretonnian realms, but amongst their own nobility. The main divide in Lyonen politics is that between the north and the south. Whilst the southern nobles were happy to be liberated from the rule of the mad and bloodthirsty Dukes of Mousillon, they were less happy when the Lyonen claimed many prime fiefs and proceeded to keep the “Old Mousillese” out of the corridors of power. Any attempts to work as a bloc are undermined by the feuds that exist between the Old Mousillese, but they do believe that they should work together to claim their rightful place.
**'''Castle Lyonnesse''' – One of the smallest Ducal Capitals in Brettonia, it is built into the walls of the very coast itself. According to folk tales, the inhabitants angered Mannan, who proceeded to flood the city leaving only the castle of the virtuous lord intact. Whatever the truth held in the story, adventurers have found ruins and golden items on the surrounding coast.

* '''Mousillon''' - A former Dukedom that has now been mostly absorbed into Lyonesse. It is the smallest and poorest of Brettonia's Dukedoms. It is filled with swamps and bogs, and the inhabitants are mainly inbred mutants. The Dukedom has become a haven for Vampires, witches, and other ne'er-do-wells who prey on the remaining peasantry. Currently unofficially ruled by Mallobaude.

* '''Artois''' - The only Dukedom to be completely covered in forest, Artois has a bit of a [[furry|Beastmen]] problem. It is common for newly anointed Knights of the Realm to be given a large portion of land in Artois. If they succeed in taming it, a new bastion has been established against the chaotic braying hordes. If not, then nothing of value was really lost. As a result, there are large amounts of ruins dotting the forest landscape.
**'''Castle Artois''' – Notable for being the only Ducal Capital without an accompanying city/village surrounding it. The building is simply a large fortress, used as a staging post by the Duke to return to after hunting beastmen.

* '''Gisoreux''' - This Dukedom lies within the treacherous slopes of the Pale Sisters and upon the low woodlands of the Arden Forest. Unlike in other parts of Bretonnia, where much of the land is one type of landscape and one type of people, the diversity in the geography of this Dukedom has also created diversity in cultures and customs. Those living within the arable plains to the south contain the typical farmers and peasants that are universal within all the realms. To the east, the lands are filled with harsh woodlands, where different people live life as expert trappers and wild woodsmen. Finally, to the north, those people that can eke out a living within the Pale Sisters are seasoned mountaineers who can brave harsh conditions.
**'''Castle Gisoreux''' – The city of Gisoreux is a busy place filled with traders and travellers. There are more Imperial merchants in Gisoreux than in any other city in Bretonnia, and it may be the only place in the world where people do not immediately think of sailors when they think of Marienburg; a number of land traders come from the Wasteland through the Gisoreux Gap. The city has fine merchant houses pressed right up against decaying slums, many of which used to be fine merchant houses. For some reason, merchant families in Gisoreux rarely maintain their prosperity for more than one generation. The castle itself is currently almost entirely abandoned, as the ruling Duke spends most of his time in Couronne. Only one wing is currently inhabited by the Duke's Steward.
**''' The Gisoreux Gap''' - One of only three locations within the entire Grey Mountains that allow passage between Bretonnia and the Empire.

* '''Bordeleaux''' - Known as the largest exporter of wines within the entire Kingdom, Bordeleaux is a beautiful land filled with many farms and vineyards. Such is the Dukedom's reputation for wine that even peasants and nobles alike are given the luxury of drinking it on a consistent basis. Being one of the few coastal Dukedoms, Bordeleaux has also a tradition of seafaring similar to L'Anguille. This has resulted in fierce competition over the sea trade and sea routes that link the large port-cities together, such as Marienburg and Erengrad to the north and Barak Varr and the Tilea city-states to the south. Unlike L'Anguille, the coastline is not treacherous to navigate, and as such many small cities and villages also act as trading ports.
**'''Castle Bordeleaux''' – A vast and rich city filled with almost every nationality in the Old World. It contains the First Chapel, the holiest of sites in the cult of the Lady. However, the most important temple to the Bordeliens is that of Manann, which is not exactly in the city. Rather, it is housed in an enormous ship, permanently moored near the entrance to the harbour. It is exposed to storms, but the priests say that Manann protects it, and it has survived for many years. Worshippers travel out by boat, and if possible they are supposed to help row or sail across. Grail Knights, Damsels and Prophetesses of the Lady are forbidden to set foot on board. Duke Alberic, the current Duke, is the first Duke of Bordeleaux in generations to visit the temple.

* '''Aquitaine''' - A pretty peaceful kingdom in the big scheme of things, and actually a pretty nice place to live in the Warhammer world. It is nothing but rolling hills and farms, punctuated with small woods and small castles of the nobility. It hasn't got any internal invaders like Orcs or Beastmen, and as such on the whole is a pretty nice place. This lack of external enemies has caused the leading nobility to turn to internal division, with small battles and wars being constant with the feuding of the leading knights. With no natural defences or trade routes, the dukedom itself doesn't have much in the way of riches or extremely defensible areas.
**'''Castle Aquitaine''' – A fairly small Ducal capital. It is famous for the Lace Tower, a tall spire built with so many windows that it looks as though it is made from stone lace. Uniquely amongst the capitals of Bretonnia, Castle Aquitaine is in fact the second keep to bear its name, standing exactly twelve miles from the ruins of the original fortress. The old castle had been used by the Red Duke, and when he was defeated King Louis the Righteous ordered the old castle razed and a new fortress-city built far away from the original site.

* '''Bastonne''' - Bastonne was at one time the very heart of all Bretonnia, its founding Duke being none other than Gilles le Breton, first Royarch of Bretonnia. It is in many ways the spiritual heart of the Kingdom, for the Cathedral of the Cult of the Lady is situated within the walls of Castle Bastonne. It is also said that the Sacred Lake where Gilles and his Companions first met the Lady, can be found somewhere deep within Bastonne's Forest of Châlons. The Chapel of Bastonne also houses the very codes of chivalry created by Gilles' son, Louis the Rash.
**'''Castle Bastonne''' – The town has the feel of somewhere preserved for the pilgrim trade, and it is a very popular destination. Peasant pilgrims are guided to the outside of a number of significant locations and to the inside of taverns that pay the guide a cut. Nobles can expect a personal tour, including opportunities to pray within most places. At a minimum, visiting nobles go to Gilles' personal Grail Chapel, and almost all Grail Knights have visited it at least once. The largest revered structure is the Water Tower in Castle Bastonne. This was reputedly Gilles' personal residence. Most nobles are not allowed to go beyond the entrance lobby, and peasants can be whipped for looking at it too much.
**'''Black Chasm''' - A giant hole in the ground, from which mysterious vapours rise periodically. Home to the [[Skaven]] of Clan Pestilens, it is here that they released the Red Pox onto the kingdom of Brettonia. Currently, the Skaven are stuck in a war between Clan Pestilens and Clan Flem against Clans Eshin and Moulder for control of the pit and any treasures that lay within.

* '''Montfort''' - the Dukedom of Montfort acts as the central buffer state between the lands of Bretonnia and those within the Empire of Man. Almost all of Montfort lies within the Grey Mountains, with what little arable land being devoted totally to agriculture.
**'''Castle Montfort''' – This Ducal capital guards the Brettonian end of Axe Bite Pass. It displays one of the finest examples of fortification within the Old World, five tiers of stone walls guard the pass at the western-most end, another just slightly smaller fortress-garrison town sits at the pass's eastern end as well. The city is primarily a trade centre charging a toll upon all who enter through the gates of the pass, going both ways, even its own citizens. It is claimed Montfort's original foundation was Dwarfen, abandoned either during or soon after the War of the Beard.
**'''Axe Bite Pass''' – At either end of the sheer-sided valley stands a mighty fortress, spanning the gap. On the Bretonnian side is Castle Montfort; on the Empire side is Helmgart. Countless battles have been fought in the valley between the two castles.

* '''Parravon''' - Forming one of the three ducal barriers between the lands of the Empire and other Ducal lands, Parravon commands the southern territories centred around the Grey Lady Pass, one of three routes that allow trade between Bretonnia and the Empire. Just like the Dukedoms of Montfort and Gisoreux, the Dukedom of Parravon lies almost exclusively upon the rocky peaks of the southern Grey Mountains, with what little flatland being devoted to agriculture. As such, many of Parravon's castles are built upon cliffs and peaks amongst the mountain range. Such a high altitude has ensured that Parravon is particularly noted for having a large number of Pegasi and Pegasus Knights amongst their ranks. In fact, they are known for their founding Duke befriending Glorfinial, lord and sire of all Royal Pegasus.
**'''Castle Parravon''' – Famous for being carved directly from the rock of the mountain, Parravon is the only city in Bretonnia with a substantial population of Dwarfs. There are now some Dwarf families who have lived there for generations, though they still keep themselves somewhat apart from the Human citizens. Bretonnia’s sumptuary laws state only nobles can use stone in buildings. However, the Dukes of Parravon have never wanted wooden buildings messing up their glorious city, so they have long maintained that a peasant living in a carved stone building is no different from a peasant living in a cave. Actually, given the quality of many peasant homes in Parravon, the difference really is minimal.

* '''Quenelles''' - Quenelles is the largest of the dukedoms of Bretonnia, stretching over most of the middle of the land. Between the Massif Orcal and the River Gilleau is a part of the Forest of Châlons. This area seems almost completely free of monsters: one or two small groups of Beastmen or Orcs are seen in a year. Small groups of hunters, charcoal burners, or woodsmen can work in the forest unmolested. All attempts to establish villages have failed, ending in the complete destruction of the village. [[Wood_Elves_(Warhammer_Fantasy)|The village is replaced, overnight, by a bare depression in the soil, as if something had scooped up the entire settlement and taken it away.]] The southwest of Quenelles was once, before the founding of Bretonnia, the land of Cuileux. The knights of Cuileux were wiped out by Goblins and their lands absorbed by Quenelles. However, the courage of the last stand of the Cuilen has made them legendary. A large area is known as the Grave of Cuileux and is not farmed.
**'''Castle Quenlles''' – The City of Quenelles sits right on the border of Athel Loren. Indeed, the walls do not guard the eastern edge of the city: instead, the walls run up to the trees and stop. A broad stone road runs along the border of the forest. This used to be the eastern wall, but it was cut down over a thousand years ago at the command of the Wood Elves.
**'''Massif Orcal''' – A large desolate place that only Greenskins call home. Ruined watchtowers dot the landscape. No mineral wealth or plants grow on this desolate place.

* '''Brionne''' - Being surrounded by powerful allies and far away from major threats, Brionne is famous for its beautiful and tranquil landscape, second only to its brethren within Aquitaine itself. Brionne is famous for its emphasis on making everything, from mighty castles to small towns as clean and beautiful as possible. [[Derp|This beauty comes at the cost of practicality and common sense. They build mighty castles are beautiful in style but horrible at their purpose.]]
**'''Castle Brionne''' – Unlike the rest of Brionne, the architects of this castle combined beauty with functionality, being incredibly aesthetically pleasing whilst also good at its job of being a fort. It also contains the Hall of Minstrels, a building with perfect acoustics that always has minstrels performing no matter the time of day or night.

* '''Carcassone''' - A highly marshalled Dukedom, even in comparison to other Bretonnian Dukedoms, Carcassonne is a heavily militarized land that focuses its efforts on eradication of the Greenskin tribes that infest the Irrana Mountains in its southern border, especially the Iron Orcs, a subspecies of Orc even tougher than Black Orcs but stupider than Savage Orcs, who have iron armor as a part of their body.
**'''Castle Carcassone''' – Castle Carcassonne stands on an island surrounded by the River Songez, the westernmost of the tributaries of the River Brienne that lie wholly within the dukedom. The attached town is small and exists to provide services to a large number of "[[Dogs_of_War|shepherd]]" companies who come to the castle to take jobs with the Duke.

==Culture==
[[Knight|KNIGHTS]]. Want something besides knights? BETTER KNIGHTS. Seriously. If there was a culture in the Old World that was more of a one-trick pony, (HA!) then the Bretonnians would probably declare a crusade for cramping their style. Bretonnian culture is all about fancy soldiers on fancy horses making fancy war. Based on the WHFRPG splatbook on the place, Bretonnia loves horses more than is strictly sane. Even peasants at least know how to ride and there's an entire sub-breed of horses designed to be easily ridden and cheaply fed, like a medieval Honda Civic. One of the most common punishments for nobles who manage to commit a crime serious enough for anyone to care is to be forced to ride in a carriage rather than on a horse like a manly man.

Outside of horses and the people with sharp metal that ride them, pretty much any French stereotype you can think of will probably be accurate aside from and surrendering. They like fancy cheese, they like wine, big on romantic themes and they never use one vowel when five will work. The splatbook also says they like truffles. So much so that they breed a special truffle hound for finding them. There's a highly suspect bit (from the 2e Warhammer RPG sourcebook on Bretonnia) that says that once a Bretonnian truffle hound gets a taste of some, he'll go psycho-territorial and try to bite off the junk of anyone nearby. Sadly no game rules exist (yet) to allow Emperor Karl Franz to lose his Sausage of Sigmar to a horny dog.

Ironically, Bretonnians actually changed quite drastically between editions before being all but abandoned. The original rendition of Bretonnians, before they became the "Chivalric Romance Knights In Shining Armor" faction was basically the French under Louis XVI - incredibly corrupt, self-centred aristocrats (with a massive problem with [[Slaanesh]] cults) ruling over dirty, downtrodden peasants. And, well, the abysmal lot of the peasants remained, but the aristocrats themselves got polished up brighter, to try and present a more sympathetic/heroic interpretation of them. Further, with the introduction of the [[Herrimault]] (aka Merrymen), you essentially have men in <s>tights</s> [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G59JnM4JKNQ&t=1s <s>TIGHT tights</s>]] ''hoodies'' running around fucking the more tyrannical nobles, that is, except when Chaos comes around, at which point Robin Hood fights alongside King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. Just long enough to avoid execution, presumably by truffle hound.

Aside from being strictly feudal, the biggest difference between Bretonnians and the Empire is that the Bretons worship mainly a single deity; the [[Lady of the Lake]], a mystical woman who gave their first ruler the power to forge the united kingdom of Bretonnia. They do pay homage to other gods and in fact, have the seat of power of the cult of Shallya, it's just that those gods are significantly less important and are only called upon when the Bretonnians need something from them. Editions have insinuated to varying degrees that the Lady of the Lake may, in fact, actually be a Wood Elf mage and that the Wood Elves are secretly manipulating the entire Bretonnian culture to use them as expendable pawns. This is why, for example, they are subtly biased against the higher technologies used in the Empire, which would make them more inclined to cut down [[Athel Loren]] for firewood.

Their honor code has been used against them many times in battle one example is how in contrast to their neighbors they cannot under any circumstances use mercenaries (though Carcassonne nobles in particular are known for hiring entire regiments of "shepherds" to protect a single sheep...). And how promises done in a duel must be kept. One example of the duel rule backfiring on them is the story of Calard of Garamont long story short his fiance was defiled by a Norscan warlord and in arrogance the knights bet on who would keep the half norscan child. The knights lost and they gave away the child to the norscans [[derp|granting the slaves of chaos a claim on bretonnian lands]].

==Knightly Hierarchy==
*'''Knights Errant:''' You thought you started your career as being a squire? Nope. Nobles who are old enough to wear their armour and sit on a horse are designated as Knights Errant and told to go off and earn glory however they can. Usually by dying. Of course, a few Knights Errant manage to survive, which earns them the rank of...
*'''Knights of the Realm:''' Your basic knight. Someone who's gotten some combat experience and respect already, they're given a bit of land to look after and some peasants to work it. This is often as far as anyone will go, unless they're obscenely rich or lucky, in which case they become...
**'''Pegasus Knights''': Though not technically higher in rank than Knights of the Realm, these guys are fuck-off rich/batshit crazy enough to afford/find and tame a giant, bloodthirsty flying horse instead of your garden variety land-bound kind. Bretonnians are not known to be exactly healthy when it comes to their love of horses, but it gets really insane with the winged ones: peasants can't even touch the animals, and one of the dukes actually killed any peasant that looked at his steed. Ferrari's owner bullshit all around, gentlemen!
*'''Questing Knights:''' For any number of reasons, a knight may give up all his lands and titles (like a [[Slayer]]), lay down his lance, vow to seek honour and greatness above all else (like a [[Slayer]]), and become a Questing Knight. These guys spend the next 10 years or so wandering around the world (like a [[Slayer]]), looking for the Lady of the Lake while slaying big, nasty stuff along the way (like a [[Slayer]]). Most die. Horribly, alone, and far from home (like a [[Slayer]]). Fortunately, they all carry giant weapons, mostly greatswords, so their death is guaranteed to have a minimum amount of win (like a [[Slayer]]). But, if they are skilled, heroic, and lucky enough, they can succeed in their quest (''unlike'' a [[Slayer]]); they find the correct Lake and meet the Green Knight. If they manage to defeat him (okay, he's holding back a lot), they get to see the Lady, drink some Powerthirst from the grail, and if they genuinely believe in the knightly ideals they claim to follow (drinking kills you otherwise), become...
*'''Grail Knights:''' The living gods of Bretonnia, they get to live for several hundred years and kick all kinds of ass. All kings have to drink from the grail, which means that unlike in '''other nations''' there is ''always'' a badass in charge. In fluff Grail knights can have all sorts of awesome powers, from killing evil creatures with a touch to healing wounds almost instantly, but on the table, all they get is magical attacks (except for the king, he also gets regeneration). Apparently, even their rotten and dried out corpses keeps some sort of magical powers and divine protection, considering that grail reliquae are a thing.

Questing Knights and Grail Knights are technically outside the usual hierarchy (with the exception of the Grail Knights who decide to regain all their titles after completing their quest, as all kings do) but, especially in the case of the latter, their word carries great weight, because they are closer to the Lady of the Lake than all others (with the exception of damsels and prophetesses of the lady, the magic-users of Bretonnia). Knights also tend to have a superiority complex that would put most high elves to shame, which means that no Questing Knight would allow himself to be directly led by a Knight of the Realm and Grail Knights only accept other Grail Knights as leaders (usually the king or a duke). Knights that actually deign to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with peasants are so rare they are considered exemplars of empathy.

Incidentally, there's only one restriction on being a Duke or lord of Bretonnia: you have to have proved yourself first. That is, you have to be at least a Knight of the Realm, but after that, it really doesn't matter. It's worth mentioning, too, that you don't inherit solely based on your parentage. If you're at least slightly capable, you'll inherit, but if a lord's son is a complete pussy, someone else will take over. This at least prevents the similar issues faced by planetary lords in the Imperium in 40k then, as this acts to weed out at least the worst of the worst (if not all the worst).

==Peasants==
{{Topquote|Thou shalt give unto thine glorious liege the taxes that he requires. Thou shalt labour all but feast days, and no more than a tenth-share shall you keep for kith and kin. Rejoice! For a knight of Bretonia provides your shield...|The Peasant's Duty}}

It's not easy being a [[peasant]] in Bretonnia. Peasants can only ever keep one-tenth of what they earn, which means that either peasants earn a lot or they are all, in fact, undead, which would explain their lack of skill at arms; otherwise they wouldn't have enough to sustain themselves. The other 90% goes to the Knights and Nobles, and any leftovers they have go back to the peasants. The splatbook for playing the first edition of the WHFB RPG in Bretonnia would go on to clarify this a little: as a peasant, your lord does indeed take 90% of your harvest, but then redistributes part of it back to you so you can survive (sort of). It's also said that some lords classify the harvest as 'weeding' meaning the peasants get to keep the 'weeds'. He's probably still going to give you just enough to survive and don't think just because you grew something really nice he's not just going to give you a bag of low-quality grain and some knight spit to cook it in. So basically feudalism with a nice big flavouring of Stalin-era socialism. The reason for this "Giving nine-tenths of everything you grow to your lord" lore error actually comes from a myth of the real-life Medieval peasantry (the reality was closer to one-tenth, and even that still left people mostly starving), which has been perpetuated by [[Games Workshop|people who don't fucking check their sources, or bother to apply logic or reason to anything they read.]]

If you are a peasant, you also live in complete filth with other peasants in disgusting holdings and you can't ever change your miserable position. But hey, things are not so bad, you can always join your Lord's men-at-arms and receive enough shinies to set you for life! Or so they told you at the time, but they forgot to mention that you had to pay for all your equipment, so you were left with squat. Still, if you work hard enough, you might become a yeoman, which may earn you the privilege of riding the retarded/maimed horses no noble would dare to look at.

Naturally, under such conditions, many peasants simply snap. Some become bandits, but those who do not wish to be hunted down for the rest of their likely short lives instead find a ragtag band of other loonies, a dead grail knight and a pointy stick to become pilgrims, hoping to earn the blessing of the Lady (usually reserved only for nobles) by fighting for truth, justice and the Bretonnian way while carrying the dead knight around. If there is no dead grail knight around, I am sure that one over there won't recover from his wounds... (don't confound them for flagellants though. Pilgrims are known to cause unrest and be coward enough to run when things look really bad, so they are not as fanatical as they want for you to believe)

The 2nd edition [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]] splatbook dedicated to Bretonnia, "Knights of the Grail", provides a lot more of a look at the peasant lifestyle, and expands upon the details a lot. In particular, because peasants (often quite rightly) don't trust their local lords not to resolve peasant disputes in the most brutally expedient manner possible, they tend to cover up their problems and try to resolve them purely amongst themselves. This usually works, but it also reinforces the fiction that the peasants actually are a happy, contented lot who live idyllic lives... aka, the complete rubbish that the vast majority of Bretonnian nobles genuinely believe because they've been spoonfed that crap their whole lives. When peasant revolts ''do'' happen, and we're told they're not that rare, this contributes to why the nobles put them down so harshly; because the uprising only happens as a last resort when the peasants just can't take it anymore, the nobles usually have no idea ''why'' it's happening - to them, it just sees to come out of nowhere, and this supports their narrative that peasant uprisings are caused by greed or base ingratitude.

Ironically, although the nobles typically blame foreign agitators for these outbursts of revolutionary sentiment, the truth is that the most common cause (other than just the nobles being assholes) is... nobles stirring up the peasants of a rival noble's land to distract their forces so the agitating noble can more easily conquer their rival. It's actually noted that foreign powers who ''do'' want to weaken Bretonnia have far more effective means than just agitating a bunch of feeble peasants. [[Chaos]] likes to stick a tentacle in when it has the opportunity, and Chaos-backed revolts are noted as extremely dangerous, far more so than usual - ordinary peasants may easily fall before the armoured might of Bretonnian knights, but a vengeful horde of mutants, often supplemented by [[beastmen]] and [[warlock]]s? That's a whole different story! Undead invaders use armies, magic, turn peasants and nobles into vampires or "recruit" dead Bretonnians to fight for them.

Technically the King or the Fay Enchantress, the hot female pope of the Lady, can raise you to nobility, but this has only happened thrice in all history of Bretonnia and your children will still be peasants. The first was a peasant named Huebald who saved a noblewoman from Beastmen; he was killed in his first battle because pretentious nobles will dislike the upstart and arranged him to die. The second was [[Repanse de Lyonesse]] AKA Joan of Ark. The third was a farmer's son named Geg, who avoided Huebald's fate by being the only peasant to ever drink from the Lady’s Grail to become a Grail Knight, making other nobles know when to quit.

==Suddenly, Total War==
{{topquote|When the clarion call is sounded, I will ride out and fight in the name of Liege and Lady. Whilst I draw breath the lands bequeathed unto me will remain untainted by evil. Honor is all, chivalry is all. Rejoice, for we, the Knights of Bretonnia, will be your shield.|Knight's vow}}
{{topquote|I set down my lance, symbol of duty. I spurn those I love. I relinquish all and take up the tools of my quest. No obstacle will stand before me. No plea of help shall find me waiting. No moon will look upon me twice lest I be judged idle. I give my body, heart and soul to the Lady whom I seek.|Questing vow}}
{{topquote|That which is sacrosanct I shall preserve. That which is sublime I will protect. That which threatens I will destroy. For my holy wrath will know no bounds.|Grail vow}}
Damn good writing.

Ahem, although the Bretonnians got [[squat]]ted twice over (first by being removed from the game, and then by [[Age of Sigmar | the entire game being removed from the game]]), they've recently got a new lease on life from their appearance in [[Total War: WARHAMMER]], where they're not only playable, but also get entirely new units that they never had in tabletop, including Hippogryph Knights, Blessed Trebuchets loaded with holy water, and Foot Squires. Even better, they have an awesome campaign that discourages mindless empire-building and instead rewards you with points of Chivalry for being a gallant Lady-fearing crusader. Every non-legendary lord must take up one by one all the aforementioned vows if they want the Grail. Want immortality, perfect vigor and your nifty divine powers? Earn it.

==UNSQUATTED AND IT FEELS SO GOOD==
[[File:New Bretonnia.jpg|thumb|300px|right|FOR ZE LADY WE RIDE AGAIN!]]
After an update, it has been confirmed that Bretonnia will be making its glorious return in [[Warhammer: The Old World]]. The setting will be taking place during the time of King Louen Orc Slayer, who ruled around the time of The Age of Three Emperors. Knights and dirty peasantry rejoice for the lands of Bretonnia are making their glorious comeback!

In a recent (and long overdue) update for The Old World some pieces of art were shown off, and among them was a picture of a dirty peasant bowman and a less dirty Knight of the Realm, both wearing the heraldry of Lord Gastille who seems to have been duke of Brionne at some point during the last 100(ish) years of the Age of the Three Emperors (you can see his heraldry on the Bretonnia map). The artwork looks pretty good and shows that Bretonnia is staying true to it's chivalrous roots and aesthetic.

==Of Knights, Lore, And Major Retcons==
For all that recent lore has Bretonnia as a place where being a peasant means you exist at the pleasure of the local nobility and can never hope to rise higher in life, this wasn't always the case. The 5th Edition Army Book, in addition to introducing the Lady Of The Lake, described becoming a knight as something that ''anyone'' could do provided they followed the ancient Bretonnian custom by which they earned it. Any area that needed a knight to protect it would designate a "perilous task" that the would-be knight had to complete, most likely involving the death of some local monster that had been eating people and causing a ruckus.

This task was traditionally chosen by "the fairest maiden in the village", who was destined to marry the one who succeeded at her task. Any brave or reckless youth was allowed to attempt it, with the volunteer being dubbed a Knight Errant and equipping themselves as best they can with whatever arms and armour they can beg, borrow, or scrounge. If they succeeded they were made a Knight of the Realm, gifted with the best armour and finest warhorse the village could afford (which, judging by the models, would make any Brettonian village ridiculously rich by real-life Medieval standards), along with lordship over the village itself and whatever lands and castle were considered part of it to defend as their own property.

There are several interesting details about this system, such as how Knights Errant are not technically knights; a Knight Errant is not a true knight, but an aspirant, the title meaning they're trying to become a knight by accepting an errand to complete. This leads directly to the tradition of the Errantry War when the king declares open season on a particular enemy and the war itself becomes an errand. Because you usually only get the chance to become a knight when your village doesn't currently have a knight, an Errantry War is a great opportunity for ambitious peasants and noble scions alike to seek knighthood, as well as a good way to raise a big army very quickly.

Of course, this also makes an Errantry War into a double-edged sword, because you have to give out the knighthoods afterwards. [[Roman Empire|If you haven't conquered enough land to go around...well, you're in a lot of trouble.]] So kings don't declare Errantry Wars very often. And, of course, to make sure there are “openings” for knighthood the peasants aren’t going to miss the fact there are too many knights already...

Another interesting detail is that the Bretonnian system of knighthood was functionally meritocratic, with knighthood something you achieved by completing an errand rather than inheriting the position. A lord's sons start out as Knights Errant and have an advantage over most peasants because they probably have access to much better training and equipment, but even so, they still have to follow the rule. No errand means no knighthood and no domain.

The system essentially worked from the bottom up, with the village as the basic unit of social organisation, and in many ways, you became a knight through social consensus. The person who succeeds at the errand is probably going to be the person with community support because the village provided the weapons, equipment, and other essential aid he needed to complete his errand. A knight was essentially a village champion, with the next level up being a champion chosen from among the knights, then you build another champion on top of them, and so on until you reached the King.

In this sense it would probably be fair to characterise 5th edition Bretonnia as a meritocratic aristocracy. You ascend to the aristocracy by performing errands, and if you were born to a noble family but fail to complete an errand then sorry, son, you're not a noble. While not perfect, the close association of the knight with the village probably helped to safeguard against abusive knights as well.

After all, who sets the errand? Who decides who the 'fairest maiden' is, and how does she decide what to do? What stops a village from agreeing to set a suicidal task if they hated the foremost candidates for knighthood, waited for those candidates to get killed and then set an easier one for the guy they liked?

Even the identification of a particular maiden as 'the fairest' had to do with social consensus. It's entirely possible that the potential knight and the maiden are already a couple and the system is gamed ahead of time. You don't get knighted by an existing knight, a lord, or the king, the whole system hinged on the local community.

Lastly, the knightly errand system made Bretonnia into what is essentially a land of D&D adventurers with a culture that puts a strong emphasis on individual heroism, serving as a nice contrast to the Empire. If you want social success, then you just had to go kill a monster! There were also no rules about how the errand is completed or any judges watching you, so it's entirely possible to complete the errand through cleverness.

Of course, [[Games Workshop]] didn't think that was [[grimdark]] enough, and for Sixth Edition decided to flip the system on its head so that instead of rising from the bottom up, it hangs down and drips faeces all over everyone unlucky enough to live at the bottom. [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]]'s [[Splatbook | Knights of the Grail]] follows the 6th edition model and provided a strict legal definition of nobility codified by Louis the Rash, the second king of Bretonnia. He made a big list of names called the Peer List: if your family name was on the list you were noble, and if all your ancestors in three generations were nobles then you were a noble, [[Nazi|but even one peasant would disqualify you.]] That means that even if ennobled peasant marries a noble, their children would still be peasants.
In theory, all Bretonnian nobles should be able to trace their lineage back to the List, and while the king has the power to add a name to the List, he has only done so three times in all of Bretonnia's recorded history. No word on how exactly Bretonnia has even survived to this day considering how dangerous a life of a knight is.
In stark opposition to the egalitarian system of 5E based on deeds, 6E Bretonnian nobility is purely a matter of ancestry. Nobles then claim fiefs and rule over villages, but are not required to interact with them in any way, and the village has no power over them.

In 5E, the knight springs from the people. In 6E, the knight dominates the people. Aren't [[retcon]]s [[Rage | nice]]?

As things stand, it mostly depends on whoever is the Lord who holds suzerainty over the village in question and in most cases it's somewhere in-between. It's also very likely that at least some people dodged the Peer List requirement over the years (it's not like anyone can tell perfectly after all the time that has passed) and got nobility and it just doesn't get exposed because not everyone is inclined to become a Questing Knight (Grail Knighthood cannot be loopholed, the Lady knows whether you are a true noble son of Bretonnia or not).

That said, looking at the 2e supplement for the RPG shows a more nuanced take. While greedy or corrupt nobles absolutely exist, most Duke are fairly reasonable, and anyone that completed the Grail Vow is a nice person who genuinly wants what's best for the peasantry... but cannot relate to them and treat them with paternalistic condescending compassion.

==Oldhammer Oddities==
Bretonnia debuted for the very first time in the 3rd edition of [[Warhammer Fantasy Battles]], making them one of the youngest [[human]] factions - for comparion's sake, the [[Amazon]]s and [[Cathay]] debuted in 2nd edition, whilst [[Norsca]], [[Araby]] and [[Nippon]] all hailed back to 1st edition. The only other human factions to debut this late in the game where [[Tilea]] and [[Estalia]].

At this point, Bretonnia had something of a dichotomy. The lore presented in the corebook presents them as something of a pre-French Revolution hellhole, where a spoiled and vainglorious king rules over decadent aristocrats whilst the benighted peasantry struggles to survive - this is the lore that [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]] 1st edition would also include, though it never visited the region.

The Grand Army of Bretonnia in ''Warhammer Armies'', on the other hand, is almost like something out of the [[Arthurian Mythos]], being made up of [[knight]]s and peasants. A female Bretonnian hero could ride a [[Unicorn]] and any Bretonnian hero could ride a [[dragon]] (either flightless or winged), but apart from those and the presence of war altars and cannons, it was basically just knights and peasants with very, ''very'' French names. They could supplement their armies by taking [[Halflings (Warhammer)|Halflings]], [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Old Worlders]] and [[Wood Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|Wood Elves]] as allies and [[Dwarfs (Warhammer Fantasy)|Dwarfs]], [[Half-Orc]]s, [[Norsca|Norse]], [[Ogre Kingdoms|Ogres]] and [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|Old Worlders]] as mercenaries, as well as take a monstrous host containing a [[dragon]], giant frogs, giant leeches, giant snails, and swarms of frogs and toads, though. though.

This interpretation didn't last long. Bretonnia went unvisited in 4th edition, but when it returned in 5th edition, it abandoned its corrupt and jaded lore for something far closer to the [[Arthurian Mythos]] its army had been built around. Whilst 6th edition would grimdark it back up, it'd still build from the 5e version of the lore, rather than the 3e version.

==Special Characters==
Whilst Bretonnia was introduced with a fairly sizable list of special characters in its 5th edition sourcebook, most of them didn't make it into subsequent editions.

* [[Louen Leoncoeur]], the Lionhearted
* [[Repanse de Lyonesse]]
* [[Baron Odo d'Outremer]], avec Suliman le Saracen
* [[Roland le Marechal]]
* [[Tancred]], Duc De Quenelles
* [[Betrand the Brigand]] and the Bowmen of Bergerac
* [[The Knight of the Perilous Lance]]
* [[Tristran le Troubadour]] avec Jules le Joungleur
* [[Reynard le Chasseur]]
* [[Armand D'Aquitaine]]
* [[Jasperre le Beau]], Dragonslayer
* [[Bohemond Beastslayer]], Duke of Bastonne
* [[The Green Knight]]
* [[Morgiana le Fay]], Fay Enchantress of Bretonnia

==Unique Fauna and Flora==
* [[Hagranym]]s
* [[Derelich]]
* [[Preyton]]
* [[Giant Snail]]
* [[Dracoleech]]
* [[Chasm Spawn]]
* [[Lakemen]]
* [[Iron Orcs]]

== Gallery ==
<gallery>
Games Workshop Hates France.jpeg|RIP Bretonnia, the Sisters shall never Forget
Part Deux.jpg|SUDDENLY
Britoinian Undead.jpg| SUDDENLY alternate
Map Bretonnia 6.jpg|You Are Here
Grail Reliquae Party.png|one of those Grail Pilgrims looks scruffier than the rest...It's the one holding the Lance.
File:TOW Bretonnian Knight.jpg
File:TOW Bretonnian Archer.jpg
</gallery>

==See Also==
* [[Warhammer/Tactics/Bretonnia|Tactics/Bretonnia]], in which we explain to you how to best bash skulls in, chaos warrior style, only from a horse.
* [[Warhammer/Tactics/6th_Edition/Bretonnia|Bretonnian tactics for the glorious 6th edition]]

== Links ==
* [https://courtofbretonnia.tumblr.com Court of Bretonnia] - a tumblrfaggot with a new, but good blog on Bretonnia.
* [http://fuckyeahbretonnia.tumblr.com FUCK YEAH BRETONNIA] - tumblrfaggot redeems self with a decent topical blog about Bretonnia.
* [http://www.roundtable-bretonnia.org/index.php The Roundtable of Bretonnia]
* [https://warhammerfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Bretonnia Warhammer Wiki - Bretonnia] - Dah Wikis
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60WQUG3XW3M Total War: Warhammer Bretonnia Trailer]

{{Regions and areas of the Old World}}
{{Playable Factions in Warhammer Fantasy Battle}}

[[Category:Warhammer Fantasy]]
[[Category:Bretonnia]][[Category:France]]

Industrial Revolution

2023-05-16T14:08:10Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Notes */

[[File:Steam engine in action.gif|300px|thumb|right|Knights clash, Nobles Plot, Kings Proclaim and Priests Preach. But for all their ambition, passion, glory, drive and zeal it's a few modestly well off men trying to figure out how to better drain flooded mines that change the world]]
{{topquote|The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.|Arthur Conan Doyle}}
{{topquote|The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.|Opening line of a [[meme|copypasta]] that [[lulz|goes on to detail all the good things that have come from it]].}}
The '''Industrial Revolution''' was a period from about 1776 to 1914 which proved to be a major game changer for humanity. Many periods of history are laid out arbitrarily by historians for book-keeping purposes. An English peasant born at the tail end of the [[High Middle Ages]] in 1340 who was lucky enough to see the beginning of the [[Renaissance]] about 90 years later most likely wouldn't think that the world at the time of his birth was all that different from the one in which he died, even if he was glad that the whole "everybody's dropping dead of plague" spell did not come back. The same would not be true if said English fellow was born in 1780 and died in 1870. In that time the majority of people had moved from the countryside to cities, factories were making everything, you could cross the country in a train in a day and send a message to newfangled Dominion of Canada at the speed of light.

==Technology==
[[Image:Victorian factory.jpg|thumb|Right|400px|A Victorian Factory, Watch your Hands]]
The big thing of note here is energy. For most of the history of civilization, if humans wanted to do something like move a heavy object from point A to Point B, dig a hole, grind grain, work iron, or whatever else, they had to do it with muscle power, either their own, other peoples' or draft animals like oxen and horses. Later, they worked out how to put wind and flowing water to use with sails, watermills and windmills. These things were useful in their own right and by the 1700s they were used in a wide variety of operations, but both had serious limitations. There are only so many rivers where you can build water-powered mills and even in windy places there are calm days, so they primarily supplemented good hold man/horsepower. A human can produce about 100 watts (joules per second) of motive power continuously, while a horse can provide about 750 watts. In contrast a kilogram of wood produces about 16-21 megajoules of energy when burned and coal has about 30 megajoules, which comes in the form of heat. Steam engines use boiling water to turn that heat into motive force which can operate factory machines, propel ships and locomotives to carry cargo, dig ditches and more. Once they had been refined to a level of practical efficiency, steam engines forever changed the nature of how work got done. First this was done by belts, gears, and rods, and later by electrical power generated by steam (or other sources) turning generators to power electric motors and lights.

One of the key advances of the Industrial Revolution was the assembly line, which allowed rapid construction of goods by giving each worker a single task to be repeated instead of requiring they have specialized knowledge of the whole process. While this idea goes back to at least the Venetian Arsenal in the Middle Ages, it became the standard during this era thanks to breakthroughs in milling, grinding, and lathing metal powered by steam (these machines were also a pre-requisite for the creation of precision instruments, without which you can't even make the machines that make the machines that make the final product). One side effect of making things on an assembly line is that items were broken into interchangeable parts that were replaceable if they broke, where before repairs were specialized work done by craftsmen, if they could be accomplished at all. The assembly line ultimately led to the proliferation of cheap automobiles, which revolutionized the concept of personal transport; the most prominent example was the Ford Model T, which was the first inexpensive mass-market automobile and remains one of the most-sold cars in history. These early cars all had unique controls and the modern, standardized control layout would not be invented until 1916 and would not achieve popularity until after 1922. Likewise, while assembly line techniques blossomed in the late 19th and early 20th century, it wouldn't be until World War II that quality control was tight enough that parts were interchangeable between factories.

Education also improved and became more universal during this era. By 1800 literacy was near universal in the United States, though this figure may not be counting slaves. Indeed, high literacy was critical to the American Revolution, which made extensive use of mass-printed propaganda like ''[[Wikipedia:Common Sense (pamphlet)|Common Sense]]''. Public education further improved these literacy rates. Democracy would gradually rise in prominence during this period thanks to increased literacy. The abolition of slavery and women's emancipation would also make serious progress during this era as an extension of the rise in literacy.

Photography was invented in the early 1800s and perfected by the 1840s, when Louis Daguerre invented the process he so humbly named after himself. The proliferation of cheap and (relatively) easily reproduced photographic images took the world by storm. Souvenir and formal photographs became a big business, along with the much creepier death photos (since it took a few minutes to capture a photo with the daguerreotype process, some people found it easier to pose a dead person than to get a live one to sit still). Battlefield photographs from the American Civil War brought the brutality of war into the public eye for the first time. Film recording also got its start during the Industrial Revolution, with the first stroboscopic animations appearing in the 1830s and stereoscopic viewers emerging a decade later. The real revolution came when Eadweard Muybridge worked out how to display a series of static photographs as a single moving image, followed swiftly by George Eastman's invention of the first photographic film in 1884 and the development of the first motion picture cameras by Louis LePrince in 1887. Other inventors and pioneers like Emile Reynaud, Ottomar Anschütz, Robert W. Paul, the Lumiere brothers, and Georges Méliès furthered the technology and brought cinema to the masses for the first time.

Weapons technology advanced by leaps and bounds. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, the average soldier was armed with a smoothbore flintlock musket that could be shot maybe four times a minute and was accurate to a hundred yards at most. Breech-loading rifles came around very shortly into the period, though the complexity of the mechanism made large scale manufacture impossible. Guns became mass produced (and were among the first complex machines with metal mechanisms to be so), but over the early 19th century rifling became standard and switched over to percussion cap firing mechanisms and were complemented by the first mass-produced revolvers. Starting in 1848, muskets began being phased out for breech-loading rifles. Metallic cartridges and smokeless powder would arrive towards the end of this era. Since black powder would rapidly foul any repeating action, smokeless powder was critical to the function of any self-loading firearm. Machine guns made their first appearance in the 1880s with Sir Hiram Maxim's invention of his namesake gun. Self-loading pistols emerged as well. Artillery advanced from simple iron tubes firing iron balls or canister rounds straight ahead to breech-loading steel guns which fired high-explosive shells on predictable ballistic trajectories.

Of course, there was a downside. Industrialization did generate a lot of wealth, but not everyone profited from it. Rural landlords found that their fields were full of surplus farmhands who weren't needed and promptly kicked them off their land to go live in dirty overcrowded cities full of cheaply made apartments into which people were crammed like sardines. To get enough to survive, everyone in a poor family older than six would have to work in hellish, unsafe conditions for 12 hours or more, often operating dangerous machines that could maim or kill an unwary operator in the heat, dark, stink and noise of it all while their bosses [[Wikipedia:Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire|forcibly locked their workers into the building]].

There were various responses to these conditions, some of which were more extreme than others. The best-known of these is the concept of the labor union, which allowed for workers in the same industry to group together and demand better working conditions from their employers. This era also saw the rise of regulations against child labor, improved safety standards and so forth. And of course, there was the enormous amount of pollution and general environmental destruction, whose effects are coming back to bite us in the ass a little over a century later. It was a legendary problem even then; the famed "London fog" that you see in every Victorian-era depiction of the city was caused by every house and business in London burning coal for heat, kicking vast amounts of soot and pollutants into the air and generating thick, toxic smog.

==Napoleonic Wars==
{{topquote|All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.|Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, ''Why Nations Fail''}}

{{topquote|In early life he may have been a sincere republican; but he hated anarchy and disorder, and, before his campaign in Italy was over, he had begun to plan to make himself ruler of France. He worked systematically to transform the people's earlier ardor for liberty into a passion for military glory and plunder.|Willis Mason West}}

Imagine a world where Tom Cruise succeeded in killing Hitler and then Rommel proceeded to do all the conquering that Hitler promised to do except without all the genocide, only to lose it all by invading Russia in winter. Replace Hitler with Maximilien Robespierre and Rommel with Napoleon Bonaparte and that's basically the Napoleonic Wars.

France was a shit place to live if you were a peasant and always had been, but the 1790s were particularly shitty. Like "why is my bread made of sawdust" shitty (no, really, that happened). Seeing that America had done all right for itself after throwing out the [[monarchy]], a bunch of French people decided they had nothing to lose and tried the same. Things got a little [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror out of hand] as they [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre tend to in France] and before long a young military officer decided that the best course of action was to shoot some protesters with cannons, and the country loved him for it.

Now that he was in control, [[Emprah|Emperor Napoleon]] had a relatively short to-do list: Lead and shape <s>Man</s>Frenchkind <s>into a psychic race</s> and surpass the <s>Eldar</s> '''Romans''' by learning from their mistakes, unite Humanity under one aegis and allow for <s>instant</s> communication and travel <s>across all human inhabited worlds</s>, kill literally every <s>Xenos</s> Brit(is there really much of a difference?) and most importantly, prevent another calamity like the Age of Strife or Fall of the <s>Eldar</s> '''Roman Empire'''.

Five coalitions were raised against the Emperor's Great Crusade, and each was smashed to pieces by his <s>Astartes</s> '''Horse Artillery''' and the <s>Solar Auxilia</s> '''Garde Impériale'''. This went on until the Emperor was betrayed by <s>Horus</s> '''the weather'''. In the disastrous invasion of <s>Isstvan V</s> '''Russia''', the Grand Army would suffer 80% losses, many due to freezing to death.

While Napoleon would fight against two more coalitions against him, the defeat in Russia would prove to be the beginning of the end.

To fund these wars Napoleon sold the United States a '''huge''' chunk of land that's now known as the Louisiana Purchase. This was actually controversial in the United States at the time since it wasn't ''explicitly'' allowed by the Constitution of the United States. The sheer size of the acquisition surprised nearly everyone except Napoleon; the negotiators sent by President Jefferson were only looking to acquire New Orleans and access to the Mississippi. Napoleon was eager to divest himself of his New World holdings because they were more trouble than they were worth (a lesson Spain never took to heart and the British only after a very long time); this was shortly after France embarrassingly lost Haiti to the world's first (and so far only) successful large-scale slave revolt. Ultimately, the argument that the power to make treaties was sufficient to make a treaty exchanging money for land won out and American settlers soon flooded the largely undeveloped land. Another lasting consequence was that Napoleon's government offered a large reward for anyone who could develop a cost-effective method of preserving food. Nicolas Appert claimed this prize when he discovered that food cooked in sealed jars would last for a long time (even though he admittedly had no clue why it worked). This would eventually be refined into canning.

The key to Napoleons success on the battlefield was mainly due to two factors. The first was that he abolished the system of purchasing military ranks, which was the norm for all other European states at the time. It didn't matter if you never even saw a musket in your life, if you laid down 10.000 Francs, you were a General of his majesty now, congratulations. Napoleon abolished this entirely, granting ranks and the prestige that came with them exclusively through merit. If you were a compentent commander, it didn't matter how high your birth or how thick your briefcase was, you could rise all the way to the top to become of Napoleons famous Marshals (although that didn't stop Napoleon from engaging in some dubious nepotism here and there - in the end, two of his brothers ended up becoming Marshals too and his son-in-law not just a Marshal, but also King of Naples). This in turn not only guaranteed that his armies and divisions were lead by the crème dé la crème of his Generals, but also increased the morale and motivation of his troops dramatically, beyond just the patriotic fervor of the years prior. Whereas the soldiers of Russia, Prussia or Austria were mostly impoverished farmhands or unlucky vagrants, pressed into uniforms and drilled until the last vestiges of humanity were stripped away, Napoleons soldiers were proud, willing to take risks and hungry for glory and promotions.

The second was that he revolutionized logistics and offensive tactics. Napoleon can arguably even be credited with inventing the basic concept of modern maneuver warfare from whole cloth. To give some context: Armies during the tail end of the 18th century usually moved in large, single formations, which mainly served the purpose of stopping any of the aformentioned pressganged sods from deserting too early. The thought of splitting up into smaller forces didn't really occur to the strategists of that time since the sense of honour put an emphasis on big, decisive single battles with little room for skirmishes. Such a big, central force had to be upkept, so they carried a sizeable chunk of civilians with them (it wasn't unheard of that the total amount of people moving in an army were at least half of the fielded manpower): metalworkers to repair cannons, smiths to make nails and horseshoes, the actual wives and children of many soldiers in the army and also, what might seem utterly bizarre to us today, people that could only be described as tourists. Napoleon did away with the civilians in his armies entirely, keeping only a number of specialists like sappers and engineers on hand, preferring to instead aquire (yes, aquire, civilians that had their possessions lifted in this system were entitled to compensation after the fighting was over and looting was heavily punished) their supplies from the cities and countryside he marched through. This gave him a massive advantage in operational flexibility and allowed him to march quicker into advantageous positions or exploit the flanks of his enemies. Another advantage of this system was that it allowed Napoleon to split his forces up into smaller divisions and corps that had permission to act independently from the main force and when opportunity arose. A common theme of diary entries of Generals that fought against Napoleon was how he always managed to take them by surprise in places they least expected attacks from. It has to be said though that Napoleons massive skill as a micromanager was often the single part that kept this machine going; in theaters were he wasn't personally involved, it generally fell apart when less competent commanders tried to do the same and felt overwhelmed in the face of the flow of information and constant decisionmaking they had to process, like in Spain and during the retreat out of Russia.

===The War of 1812===
The young USA would engage in its own concurrent fight against the British. In 1812, the U.S. declared war on the British over press-ganging of American sailors... two days after the British put a stop to it (transatlantic communication at the time could go no faster than transatlantic ships, which took roughly two months). The official ''casus belli'' aside, the real reason the United States declared war on Britain was in retaliation for British support of Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederation and a desire to conquer Canada. Despite terrible results for the US on land, which saw the White House burned down by Canadians, the U.S. did better than expected on the naval front. Even with Napoleon tying up most of the Royal Navy, the hastily raised and underfunded U.S. Navy matching them was a serious accomplishment.

One especially notable U.S. vessel was the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_floating_battery_Demologos United States floating battery ''Demologos''] (retroactively renamed the ''Fulton'' after its creator), the first documented steam warship. However, the principle muscle of the USN was the nation's first six frigates, originally constructed to fight the Barbary pirates. Although they were relatively old ships by the start of the war, they were still well armed, sturdy, exceptionally fast for their weight and virtually cannon-proof due to their composite-armor-like hulls, built from American live oak instead of comparatively flimsy European wood. This is where USS ''Constitution'' got her nickname of "Old Ironsides"; during a battle with HMS ''Guerriere'', one of her crewmen watched shot after shot bounce off ''Constitution'''s hull like a Tau punching a Space Marine and famously shouted "Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!" After a string of high profile defeats the Royal Navy forbade their captains to engage them with less than a two-to-one advantage.

In December 1814 both sides declared peace since they weren’t getting anywhere and the original cause for the war was no longer applicable. On 8 January 1815 [sic] the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans Battle of New Orleans] was fought and ended in an overwhelming U.S. victory, despite the war already being over (see the above point of communication being slow).

==Transportation==
In 1800, if you wanted to get from point A to point B your options were limited. You could always walk, in which case you might be able to cover maybe 50 kilometers a day at 4kph if you're in good health and traveling light. Catching a lift on a farm wagon was about as fast, but it's not you doing the walking. If you had the cash, you might use a stagecoach, drawn by a team of horses which were regularly swapped out and could go along at 13-16kph if the roads were good (and that's a big If). A sailing ship might be able to match that speed if there was favorable conditions (and that was a big if) and would be on the move 24 hours a day. Most people of the period lived their whole lives without going more than 30km from their birthplace; travel was the domain of elites, the wealthy, merchants and their associates, and armies on the march. While there had been refinements (some of which were fairly substantial, especially with ships) this basic set-up had been the case since the Bronze Age. But this ancient order would soon be overturned by steam power.

First there were steamboats with experiments starting in the 1700s in Britain, France and America. It was a fairly straightforward idea: take a boat, slap a steam engine in it, hook it up to a paddle wheel and hope that nothing catches fire or blows up. By the early 1800s there were some steam tugboats. By the 1810s there were paddleboats handling cargo on canals and rivers. By the 1820s there were experimental steamships which could cross the Atlantic mostly using engine power and by the 1830s there were regular transatlantic crossings. The big advantage of a steamship over a sailboat was that it could sail straight into the wind without giving a shit. Voyages that could take months at full sail could be done in a week. Even so sailing ships still persisted for some time in some roles as they did not need their coal bunkers topped off all the time.

Self-powered ships were a big deal for maritime trade, but on land something new rolled down the lines. Steam locomotives started put hauling carts in English and coal mines, then upgraded in 1826 to moving freight and passengers. In 1829, Stephenson's Rocket managed to achieve the ''amazing'' overland speed of 48 kph. Things only escalated from there. By the 1830s, there was a full blown railway boom in the UK as rail lines snaked their way over the British Isles and their colonies. The US followed soon after, then the French and gradually the Germans, Spanish, Russians, Italians and so forth got in on the game. For the United States in particular railways shaped the cultural landscape of the country. Chicago and several other cities went from podunk towns to major cities thanks to their use as a rail hub and expansion of the rail network west was a key tool in settling the frontier. The same applied to Canada with the Canadian Pacific. The big American rail companies also became massively powerful [[Megacorporation]]s in the modern sense. In the latter of half of the century, trams and trolleys began to emerge for use inside cities, providing the forerunner to modern public transit services.

From moving Iowa grain and bananas from Havana to the European market to sparking the beginnings of tourism to the creation of the first suburbs, both steamships and railways transformed national economies and the ways people lived and worked. They also changed warfare. Steamships could easily outmaneuver and outrun pure sailing vessels; on land trains could easily move soldiers and supplies in huge numbers.

This was also the time when humanity first took to the air. The first hot-air balloons appeared in the late 18th century and were gradually refined. In 1852 the French built a hydrogen balloon with a small steam engine, allowing the operator to move it about as he wished. Further experiments were made through the latter half of the 19th century with lighter than air flight. At the same time, inventors began to work with gliders to achieve heavier than air flight. Despite the claims of a few derpy dorks forever consigned to be laughingstocks that heavier than air flight was impossible for humans, the Wright Brothers managed to achieve powered flight in 1903.

=== Communications ===
Similarly communications made quantum leaps ahead. When the Founding Fathers signed the Constitution, you sent a message long distance by writing it down and giving it to either a courier on horseback or a ship. This meant that it would take months for news to get from China to Britain and vice versa for the reply.

The first optical telegraph system was built in 1793, and the French Empire under Napoleon greatly expanded this network and made good use of its ability to transmit signals across great distances. The electrical telegraph evolved during the same time period, but the British and French initially ignored it because they thought the optical system was just fine. This didn't stop inventors from refining and perfecting the device, and the first commercial electric telegraph came online in 1837, with widespread adoption occurring shortly thereafter. Undersea cables were laid across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific, connecting the world for the first time. Early versions of telex and fax machines used the technology as well. Interestingly enough, the Telegraph was in some ways like a proto-internet. It was operated by a network of users which formed their own community with romances, chatter and memes, users contrived elaborate systems of coding to convey lots of information with a few words and while people could make massive amount of money off it either by running companies or getting up-to-date information on world potato prices it was also a prime vehicle for fraud and other such skullduggery.

In the 1890s came Guglielmo Marconi and wireless telegraphy, which quickly became the standard comms equipment for ships and is the main reason anyone survived the sinking of the ''Titanic''. Alongside this came the discovery of radio waves, which went quickly from experimental technology to cheap, mass-produced sets. The telephone was also invented in the late 19th century.

==Meiji Revolution ==
{{topquote|智識ヲ世界ニ求メ大ニ皇基ヲ振起スべシ (Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.)|Meiji Charter Oath}}
[[Image:Meiji era Train.jpg|Railways come to the land of the Rising Sun, memorialized in Woodcut|thumb|right|300px]]
During the Age of Exploration, Japan had closed its borders to most of the outside world to prevent foreign influence (even going so far as to kill castaways, missionaries and their converts - even Japanese sailors who were rescued by foreign ships were prevented from returning home), and for a time, the Shogunate was successful in preventing Europeans from encroaching on Japan like they had in so many other parts of the world. This came to a crashing halt over 200 years later on the 8th of July 1853. The USS ''Mississippi'' and some other American ships arrived in Edo to deliver a message from US President (at the time of the Mississippi's departure) Millard Fillmore requesting the reopening of trade. The ''Mississippi'' and its companions returned on the 12th of February 1854 and led to the Convention of Kanagawa in March (funny enough, Fillmore's term in office was over before this). There were other developments like the British bombing a port in revenge for a murdered businessman, said port's rulers in the Satsuma domain agreeing to pay reparations by buying warships, having been thoroughly impressed by their firepower, the assassination of the Shogun's number two Ii Naosuke and an attempt to burn the Imperial Palace. This led to a weakening of the ruling Shogunate that allowed Emperor Meiji to seize back power in the violent but swift Boshin War in 1868, permanently ending the Shogunate and the feudal system that had ruled Japan for centuries. The die-hard Shogunate loyalists briefly declared a Republic but they were defeated at Hakodate in the final weeks of the war. One of the foremost Imperial samurai and part of the ruling triumvirate under the Emperor, Saigo Takamori, led his home domain of Satsuma into a brief rebellion after disagreeing with some of the reforms and the triumvirate falling apart with one of them dying of illness and Saigo being rivals with the other guy. During the Battle of Shiroyama Saigo's last charge, mortal wounding and assisted seppuku, followed by the final charge of his 50 remaining followers marked the end of the samurai in the face of conscripted peasants with rifles and cannons. With the last of the big three being assassinated by ex-samurai after the Rebellion, ironically not far from where Naosuke had been shot and decapitated, it was over.

The new Meiji government, not wanting to be consumed and dismembered by the Western powers as many other Asian countries already had, undertook a rapid adoption of Western technology and, eventually, started doing some empire building of its own. On the one hand, the fact that a formerly isolated nation could go from a feudal backwater to a competitive modern nation in just a scant few decades was remarkable. On the other hand, the need to maintain Japan's power to prevent Western imperialism from getting all up in their shit directly led to Japan's own growing military autocracy. Military success against China in 1894, and against Russia in 1905 combined to put Japan on the world stage. The latter conflict especially put the West on notice; everyone had expected Russia to curb-stomp the Japanese, only for the Japanese to kick the shit out of the Russians on land and win an absolutely crushing victory at sea in the Battle of Tsushima. Nearly the entire Russian fleet was wiped out in exchange for three Japanese gunboats and a handful of casualties, one of whom was future admiralissimo Isoroku Yamamoto (he lost two fingers to a bit of shrapnel and would have been discharged if he'd lost a third). The architect of this grand victory, Admiral Heihachiro Togo, was celebrated as a national hero, and his flagship ''Mikasa'' is preserved as a museum in Yokosuka. While the samurai as a class lost their traditional power of free money and being able to execute disrespectful peasants, enough of them saw the writing on the wall that they found positions in the new order, using the wealth and education that their families had accumulated to enter politics, the military academy, or found many modern institutions one would recognize today, such as Mitsubishi.

==The American Civil War==
{{topquote|We are [[Grimdark|not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people]], and [[Exterminatus|must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war]].|William Tecumseh Sherman preparing to [[Rip and Tear|go absolutely fucking scorched earth]]}}

The American Civil War is one of those subjects that we could write a shit ton about, but one we could never do the due diligence to be 100% accurate to the events. Needless to say, this is our humble attempt to cover the subject. If nothing else, just know it wasn't about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy| States Rights.]

Shortly after achieving independence, a distinction between the newly United States became more and more pressing. The southern colonies had been settled by men who wanted to make a lot of money in the New World and who set up plantations manned by slaves growing tobacco and cotton. The desire to present a united front in the writing of the constitution compromised with the slave states in giving them extra political power a la the 3/5ths compromise, where somewhere around 60% of the black population counted towards a seat in the House of Representatives. Of course, they wouldn't dare let the people who are giving them more power from sharing said power except by making money. The northern colonies were settled by groups who wanted to recreate England (or their ideal version thereof) where the cash crops grown on plantations were not profitable and to whom slavery increasingly became morally repugnant and was perceived as economically unfair.

There was some hope that slavery was on its way out at first (many of the Founding Fathers had believed that the growth of industrialization and the declining price of tobacco would make slavery obsolete and thus left the problem for future generations to solve), and then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made it much easier to process cotton and allowed for the vast expansion of cotton plantations, leading the slave owners to become very wealthy and invest their profits in buying more slaves to pick more cotton. Even those who did not profit directly from slavery still supported the institution, if only because they were terrified of the possibility of a slave revolt or an outright race war, as had been the case in Haiti just a few decades prior.

There was also a growing sense of abolitionism in the North. The British had shut down their transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in 1833, with France following in 1848. While the number of hard-line abolitionists in the North was comparatively small, they were making headway and there were various groups opposed to slavery to various degrees. Tensions rose gradually in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, from "mere" outright brawls in the United States Senate to the "Bleeding Kansas" incident, to John Brown's attempted slave revolt at Harper's Ferry. This led to the Southern states attempting to create new slave states as fast as possible and other ploys which spiraled things out until South Carolina decided to secede, and James Buchanan refusing to do anything because he sympathized with the southern cause. Fearing that "The Peculiar Institution" would be contained, constrained, and eventually brought to inevitable extinction, the powers that be in the South pushed for a violent breakaway. This in spite of the fact that Lincoln had historically sought compromise as opposed to taking a hard line on the issue, something that changed as the war progressed.

This war is notable for being the most destructive conflict to take place within the United States, killing 700,000 and leveling several cities, and was among one of the biggest wars that was fought between industrial powers up to that point. One reason for this is that the North simultaneously held that South never left the US and that a total war with intentional targeting of the civilian population and infrastructure was OK. Another was a fear among the North that if the war was not won quickly (regardless of cost in lives) public opinion on it would sour, Lincoln would lose reelection and the war might end without the South's defeat.

The war consisted broadly of two halves, cleanly divided by the Battle of Gettysburg. The first half was characterized by a series of grand maneuver battles in the east in which the Confederates tended to win on account of all the more competent, professional generals picked their side, most notably the [[skub|legendary]] [[tactical genius]] Robert E. Lee, while the Union had to make do with politicians, corrupt hacks, and old men left over from the War of 1812. Morale was also an important factor; the Confederates tended to be on the average much more motivated, as they were carried by a deep belief that they were fighting a defensive war, something that was amplified in Confederate propaganda. The Union forces, on the other hand were mostly comprised of poor sods from the slums of New English cities like New York that couldn't afford the 100 dollars(12 bucks today) to rid themselves of being conscripted. In some other cases, soldiers were recruited straight from the ships that carried numerous European immigrants, and among these the Irish were the most prominent. A vicious cycle ensued where every moron Lincoln gave command to would boldly set out to conquer Richmond and end the war in one stroke, only to run into Lee playing tower defense on the most unfair terrain available. Union Commander of the Month would furiously throw men at Lee's lines until the grumbling from the ranks started to sound mutinous (Fredericksburg, Manassas, the Peninsula) or just stare at his lines until getting blindsided outta fucking nowhere, usually by Stonewall Jackson (Chambersburg, Chancellorsville, Second Manassas).

Either way, it'd end with the Union sulking back to Washington with about 2/3rds the army they started with. This would repeat several times until eventually Lee got cocky and tried the same thing (Gettysburg and technically Antietam although that was more of a really bloody draw). By the time of Gettysburg, there were Union soldiers (the remnants of the 2nd Maine for example) who could accurately claim to [[Fail|have gone 0 for 11 against the Army of Northern Virginia]]. At Gettysburg, however, shit went sideways for the Confederates in a big way. General Meade, a halfway competent general, was finally in charge on the Union side, Stonewall Jackson was dead, Jeb Stuart took his cavalry off on a pointless ride to nowhere, the Army of the Potomac found and occupied some of the best defensive terrain of the war, and the Army of Northern Virginia couldn't lever them out of it despite two days of very bloody fighting. This culminated in Lee picking out some of his best divisions and ordering them to charge up the middle of the Union position, supported by all his artillery. The Union army sat and waited for the the Confederates to finish shooting, then chewed the attacking divisions up with volley fire and artillery like a Carnifex brood tearing through Imperial conscripts. The attack actually breached the Union line, but was smashed and driven back with heavy casualties. The point the Confederates reached on Cemetery Hill is now known as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
[[Image:ShermansMarch.jpg|[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufSGd58gjAM M-i-c, k-e-y, m-o-u-s-e. Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?]|thumb|right|250px]]
However, the Western Theater was a different story; a pair of grimdark badasses named Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were leading the Union on a steady slog of wins up and down the Mississippi River system. Though there were some touch and go moments, such as at Shiloh, Grant kept his head and his command and ultimately masterminded the successful Vicksburg campaign, which saw him outflank the city after ordering his fleet to do a balls-out run past its defensive batteries before bitchslapping the Confederate defenders back into their trenches and settling in for a siege that lasted until 4 July 1863, the day after Pickett's Charge was shot to pieces at Gettysburg. Losing Vicksburg and New Orleans cut the Confederacy in half and gave the Union unchallenged control of the entire Mississippi, the most important interior waterway in the country. After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln scented blood in the air, decided he just wanted to win and didn't care how messy it got, and so gave Grant command of the Army of the Potomac. Grant knew that the Union had more men and more equipment, and if he couldn't outmaneuver Lee, he was perfectly content to [[Imperial Guard|win by attrition]]. Grant sent Sherman rampaging through Georgia like an [[Eversor]] with flamers, and then settled in for a year of meatgrinder trench warfare with Lee that was basically just World War One without biplanes and machine guns.

It has to be noted: Grant was not just a "mindless butcher". He had terrible casaulty figures to be sure, but there were reasons for this: One is that Grant had noticed that the Confederates kept beating the Union by whipping them, then waiting to recover, then repeat. So the only real way to deny this to the Confederacy and especially Lee was to keep fighting and keep Lee's Army reeling, preventing any real reinforcement or supply to restore the lost men and material. Grant was bold, and displayed excellent leadership characteristics and a coolness under pressure. So cool, that part of the reason for his victory in the Wilderness campaign was because Lee lost his cool and flung men at a position and expected them to win the day. Yeah, Lee had a habit of this, and it's part of the reason that his reputation as a "tactical genius" is [[skub|hotly debated]] to this day.

While the war was started over the issue of slavery, complete emancipation was not one of the North's original war aims. However, as more Southern territory fell to the Union advance, thousands of slaves came into the custody of the Union army, either by being liberated directly or by making a break for it as soon as the bluecoats were close enough. This became troublesome in the latter years of the war, as it presented the Northern generals with a serious logistical and humanitarian challenge: feed not only a fighting army on the move, but their ever-growing train of liberated slaves. This problem was particularly acute for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea Sherman's March to the Sea]. Some Union generals addressed this problem by offering enlistment to liberated slaves, although this practice was not universal. However, many slaves fled Confederate territory to join up with Union forces and a good number of them ended up serving in the Union Army, including the legendary 54th Massachusetts. Ending slavery not only became political policy, but also a weapon of war since it destroyed the Confederacy's economy. This led to the Emancipation Proclamation, issued after Gettysburg, and eventually the adoption of the 13th Amendment and with it the abolition of slavery. The vileness of slavery became more known as Union soldiers saw firsthand the plantations and what it did to black people, and while some didn't give a shit or even thought it was only natural, there were plenty who saw that shit and resolved to send the Confederates straight to hell for it.

==The American Frontier==
{{topquote|You have died of dysentery.|''The Oregon Trail''}}
Throughout the mid 1800s Americans spread rapidly westward. This was aided by several large land purchases such as the aforementioned Lousiana Purchase; this was a huge step for the young nation as they now had a major highway (The Mississippi River) linking the entire back country from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico. But said expansion would only accelerate after a little incident south of the border where American settlers living in the Texas territory got fed up with the Mexican government and seceded the entire territory north of the Rio Grande. Texas joined the Union and Mexico gave up a bunch of land after getting its ass kicked. This led the United States to stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Fueling this was several gold rushes and a series of Homestead Acts, which gave ownership of land for free if you lived on it and maintained it. Canada also had a western frontier at the same time, but that part isn't nearly as well remembered (Did you play Yukon Trail? Did you even know it existed?). Huge waves of settlers were eager to reach the newly claimed California and Oregon territories, but before any railroads were laid down, they had to travel by wagon through the barren and hostile wilderness in between, with many would-be settlers dying to disease, hypothermia, hyperthermia, attacks from upset Native American tribes, and in at least one infamous case, [[Wikipedia:Donner_Party|cannibalism]].

This era has long been dramatized to the point it has become its own genre, the Western. This goes so far back ''[[Wikipedia:The Great Train Robbery (1903 film)|The Great Train Robbery]]'', one of the first films with a narrative '''ever''', was a western. Westerns dramatized the "Wild" West as a chaotic wasteland full of bandits and savages where a man would be killed for any or no reason, but historically this was not the case. Statistically the west was actually very peaceful outside of the wars, especially compared to cities out east. The big outlaws, shootouts and murders were simply very publicized '''because''' they were unusual. Still, many of these more famous incidents showed how loose the power of the law was out in the frontier, as in several cases, you had several figures who had been on both sides of the law (Billy the Kid’s Regulators, Wyatt Earp’s revenge ride, etc) usually due to conflicting interests between locally powerful factions.

==The Unification of Germany==
{{topquote|The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.|Otto von Bismarck about the unification of Germany}}

One of the aftereffects of Napoleon's brief stint into making France the all-encompassing superpower of Europe was that he motivated quite a lot of people to identify themselves with their nation instead of families or rulers. The place where this nascent idea of nationalism reverberated the most were the German states, which had been notorious for their disunity since the age of Charlemagne. Liberal and nationalist ideas that sought to unify Germany into one nation ultimately culminated in a series of revolutions that all failed until Prussia, under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck (a man with a political genius as massive as his mustache), kicked the Austrians out of the German territories and won a war against France in 1871.

The Franco-Prussian War, incidentally, had not a lot to do with Germany in itself. The southern German states (Hesse, Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria) that were still independent from Prussia at this point, leaned towards Austria. Instead it was about... Spain. Spain? What does fucking Spain have to do with Germany? Well Spain had a lot of issues at the time, the most pressing of which that it was a colonial power with no monarchy; their previous queen had been removed from power by a coup. After [[Blam|order had been restored]], the question remained whose dynasty should ascend to the Spanish throne. One of the proposed candidates was Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a scion of a branch of the Prussian royal family that remained Catholic. France was very paranoid about being outmaneuvered by the Germans and sought to prevent that, but Bismarck carefully manipulated a series of events, including the careful redacting and publication of a diplomatic telegram to make it seem as if the French had pressured the Prussian King to withdraw Leopold's candidacy for the Spanish throne (when in reality Leopold had already declined to Wilhelm) to lure France into a war with Prussia and the German states. [[Just as planned|And it worked.]] The South Germans were outraged, and the French found themselves faced with a Hobson's choice: either they could go to war or suffer severe diplomatic embarrassment at home and abroad. The following conflict saw the French being thoroughly curbstomped within eight months as the Prussians outmaneuvered and outgunned them again and again. Massive conscription after the majority of professional soldiers fell into Prussian captivity at Metz and Sedan did little to alleviate the problems. To add insult to injury, the Germans proclaimed their new Empire in Versailles, the old seat of the French kings, driving a wedge between France and Germany that would not be overcome until the 1960s.

The unification of Germany marked a massive shift in the balance of the European powers. The weakest power in the European concert (Prussia) suddenly became the strongest on the continent, with a massive population, a disciplined and modern army that ground every enemy it faced into the dirt like they were nothing, and a huge industrial base that was kicked into overdrive once the multitude of national barriers between the small German dukedoms were abolished (also helped by the reparations France had to pay to the Germans as well as the capture of Alsace-Lothringia and its rich deposits of ore). It grew so fast and rapidly that only in the span of 30 years, it managed to surpass the production levels of steel and coal of every other imperial power in the world and singlehandedly pioneered large-scale industrial chemical production with inventions like the Haber process for synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen (invaluable and irreplaceable in anything that has to do with anorganic chemistry, like most of the fertilizers used in contemporary farming). In general the German Empire was at the forefront of what's called the "Second Industrial Revolution" of the late 19th century.

The Germans, being late to the party as far as imperialism was concerned, wanted a piece of that big fat colonial cake that they felt were owed and used their industrial and military leverage to apply massive pressure to the rest of Europe. This, combined with the inherent semi-feudal social order that had persisted in Prussia since the 1600s and the rampant militarism of German society, created a very aggressive nationalist machismo which ultimately contributed a lot to the crisis that led to World War One with all of its cataclysmic consequences. Nearly all negative stereotypes people associate with Germany to this day, like militarism, brutishness, blind obedience, lack of humour, strict workplace discipline, punctuality, and being unemotional come from this particular era. The culture that this attitude bred eventually led to the mindset that gave rise to the Nazis after Germany's defeat in World War I and only started to fizzle out after the old elites of the German Empire were permanently removed from power after World War II forced the Germans to reinvent themselves and their nation.

== The British Empire ==
{{British}}
{{topquote|On her dominions the sun never sets; before his evening rays leave the spires of Quebec, his morning beams have shone three hours on Port Jackson, and while sinking from the waters of Lake Superior, his eye opens upon the Mouth of the Ganges.|The Caledonian Mercury}}
[[image:British Empire 1921.png|thumb|left|400px|“C" is for colonies
Rightly we boast
that of all the great nations
Great Britain has most!"- Mrs Ernest Ames, An ABC for Baby Patriots]]

Remember the British East India Company from the [[Age of Enlightenment]]? Well, eventually Britain decided to drop the pretense that it was merely an English corporation that was building colonies everywhere and just owned the fact that, yes, they were trying to take over the world. They hadn't been the only ones; the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Germans, Russians, and several American presidents were as well, and near the end Japan would try to get in on the action.

The Napoleonic Wars had left the British in the enviable position of having the world's biggest, baddest navy. This was a title they would hold until the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the massive debts the British had racked up during WWI led them to conceded that they would have to be okay with the US Navy equaling them in size. They would lose it entirely after the Second World War, due to the tremendous debts of fighting that war piled on top of the previous one.

Having a massive navy at its disposal meant that the British could effectively dictate terms to anyone within sight of the sea. This persuasion was not solely political strong-arming, but also took the form of general peacekeeping and anti-slavery operations with the West Africa Squadron alone freeing hundreds of thousands of slaves and largely shutting down the Atlantic Triangle. At its height the British Empire had founded colonies or established protectorates on almost every major landmass on Earth, and had presences at the key maritime choke points of Gibraltar, the Suez, the Cape of Good Hope, Singapore, and the Falklands near Cape Horn. It was said that "The sun never sets on the British Empire," which is still technically true due to the existence of the Pitcairn Islands.

=== The Crimean War ===
The Crimean War is one of those wars that tends to be forgotten about by non-history buffs, but its effects on the world were out of all proportion to its relatively short duration (October 1853-February 1856). This was the war that gave us [[Wikipedia:Florence Nightingale|Florence Nightingale]], [[Wikipedia:Charge of the Light Brigade|the Charge of the Light Brigade]], the [[Wikipedia:Victoria Cross|Victoria Cross]], and the [[Wikipedia:Government reforms of Alexander II of Russia|Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II]]. It was also one of the first conflicts to see widespread use of high-explosive shells, telegraphs, railways, and photography; in some senses it can therefore be considered the first modern war.

The war was ostensibly started over the treatment of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, but in reality it was all about the balance of power in Europe. The Ottoman Empire was in the middle of its long collapse, and Russia was taking the opportunity to flex its muscles in Central Europe. Britain wasn't thrilled by the prospect of Turkey being conquered by Russia, and Napoleon III needed a show of strength abroad to strengthen his position at home. When the Ottomans asked for changes to the agreement on their treatment of Orthodox Christians, Russia threw a fit and declared war. The British, French, and eventually the Italians sided with the Ottomans. At first, the fighting was bloody and inconclusive, with the Russians mauling the Ottomans at the Battle of Sinop and laying siege to Kars but being stopped at Silistra. The British and French promptly sent ships and troops through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea and invaded the Crimea. This is where the Battle of Balaclava and the Siege of Sevastopol took place. Balaclava became famous for the [[Wikipedia:The Thin Red Line (Battle of Balaclava)|"Thin Red Line"]] of the 93rd Highlanders and the [[Wikipedia:Charge of the Light Brigade|Charge of the Light Brigade]]. The Siege was a badly managed, yearlong slog that killed thousands of troops on both sides and wound up killing the British army commander, Lord Raglan, who'd been catching hell in the press since Balaclava and was even more depressed that the Russians were holding out for so long. Ultimately the mounting casualty figures and apparent pointlessness of the whole thing led Britain and France to call for peace negotiations, the outcome of which saw Russia and Turkey handing back the territories they'd captured and Russia losing the right to base ships in the Black Sea. Russia's defeat was seen as a national humiliation and led directly to the Great Reforms of Alexander II. Among other things, he abolished serfdom in the Empire, modernized the military, relaxed press censorship, and reformed the justice and educational systems. Most of these reforms were rolled back by reactionary conservatives after Alexander was assassinated in 1881, which led to increasing unrest in the country's radical underground and may have ultimately contributed to the Russian Revolution in 1917. On the flipside, the British got the lasting cultural legacy of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale. Horrified by the reports of wounded British soldiers being treated in atrocious conditions, Florence rolled up her sleeves, went to the Crimea with some of her friends, and effectively invented the modern nursing profession while also pushing for reforms in sanitation that greatly reduced death rates in the field hospitals and would later be implemented throughout India and Britain.

Also led to the birth of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention.

=== The Indian Mutiny ===
In 1853 the cost of rifling had come down enough that the British could transition from smoothbore firearms supplemented by specialist riflemen, both using the slow and relatively unreliable flintlock system, to standardizing on a rifled, percussion-cap weapon, resulting in the 1853 Enfield. Like many firearms of this era, it was loaded via cartridges consisting of the powder and ball in a sealed paper sleeve. The rifle was loaded by tearing open the cartridge (often by biting it), pouring in the powder, and ramming in the ball. This significant arms upgrade eventually reached India. In 1857 rumors (which were never proven) developed that the cartridges were coated with animal fats including beef tallow and pork lard, pissing off the Hindu and Muslim natives. This proved to the final straw for a long-brewing rebellion. Shortly into the Mutiny, the mutineers at Cawnpore slaughtered women and children who had surrendered. This proved to be a PR disaster for the rebels, killing any claim they had to legitimacy or the moral high ground and enraging the British public enough to warrant a very strong response. One important note is that the mutiny was not total (in fact, the conflict was mostly contained to Bengal), and many colonial troops fought against the mutineers, particularly Sikhs who had no prohibitions on pork or beef and were keen on the idea of getting to kill Hindus and Muslims. The conflict would lead to the effective end of the British East India Company in favor of direct rule (the "British Raj"), which was generally a serious improvement in conditions for Indians if you continued to ignore the lack of influence they had over how they would be ruled.

While relatively short (a year and a half), there was little lull in the action and there are a lot of firsthand accounts one can look through to get an understanding of combat in the era. Of particular note is the several accounts of rebels being shot multiple times with a revolver but living long enough to kill or seriously injure men with their swords, which remain important in any consideration of knife vs. gun. One officer even managed to kill ~10 rebels with a ''spear'' by funneling them through a narrow doorway.

As a side note, the rifle at the center of this would eventually be exported to the Confederate States of America (see above) in large numbers, which after its defeat would then be sold surplus to the post-Sakoku Japanese government (see above again).

=== The Boer Wars ===
During the Napoleonic Wars the British gained control of every Dutch colony, and while they handed most of them back afterwards, they decided the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa was too good to let go, so they bought it. [[Rape|The Dutch weren't in a position to refuse the offer]]. A long series of disputes arising from this eventually escalated into a war between the Dutch-descended Boers and the British colonials (the Africans in the region were smart enough to know that they were kinda screwed no matter who won). Both wars were disasters for the British (even though they eventually won the second through overwhelming force) thanks to using Napoleonic tactics in an era of rifled repeating firearms. This was even worse in the first war since the British had not yet ditched their iconic red uniforms. Even after they got wise and switched to khaki, things didn't improve in the early stages of the Second Boer War as Redvers Buller, in charge on behalf of Garnet Wolseley, proved an unmitigated failure, losing battle after battle. After Buller got fired and replaced by Wolseley's rival Frederick Roberts (which caused the British army to basically split in two thanks to tensions between Wolseley's African colonial veterans and Roberts and his Indian troops), the Brits won on the field and the Boers resorted to an insurgency which was brutally suppressed (by which we mean the term "concentration camp" was literally invented here). Adding insult to injury, Roberts replaced Wolseley as Commander-in-Chief after the war.

The Boer Wars have been largely forgotten except by military historians due to their [[The World Wars|foreshadowing of things to come]]. One thing that has survived into the present day is the term "commando", which originally referred to the organization of the Boer forces during the wars and acquired its modern usage due to their unorthodox (for the time) tactics this organization enabled.

==Notes==
*This was the era where Europeans, and the nations descended from them, truly and unquestionably ruled the world. Their head-start in industrialization, advanced military and civilian technology, the vast accumulated wealth from previous centuries, and advanced medicine and agriculture gave them an advantage that any other culture at the time was incapable of overcoming. With that came a lot of nastiness. You see, the notion that people not born with a silver spoon up their arses were worth more than their value as meatshields or manual laborers hadn't caught on yet, and this went double for foreigners. The ruthlessness and blatant disregard for human life with which the imperial powers of the time exploited the people they ruled over caused widespread resentment and led to a long series of uprisings, some more successful than others. Later down the line this exploitation triggered the decolonization movement and the brutal struggle of the underclasses for equal rights and humane treatment (which continue to this day).
*The agricultural revolution, where machines and other modern technology were applied to farming, accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the former fed the latter by allowing enough food to be produced that the majority of workers could take factory jobs instead of agricultural work. Additionally, the invention of the Haber-Bosch-process made the large-scale production of anorganic fertilizer from atmopheric nitrogen possible, turning landscapes that were previously thought of as unsuitable for any kind of farming into lush gardens. This earned Fritz Haber, its inventor, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1919 (at the time a very controversial decision, as Haber also provided his expertise to the German war effort and among other things invented ammonium nitrate as a substitute for TNT and the first chemical weapons to be used in WWI.)
* Several technologies supported the process of industrialization. Steam power helped kick things off by revolutionizing manufacturing and transportation, but two others were also important. Large machinery and tall buildings required steel to become cheap enough that it could be made on a massive scale. Historically, making good-quality steel was a time-consuming process that needed the careful attention of expert craftsmen. This changed with the invention of the Bessemer process, wherein bellows would be used to blast hot air directly into the molten iron to get it hot enough to smelt out impurities. Electricity also helped tremendously, allowing for much longer working cycles through lightbulbs and improved communications through telegraph and radio.
*The invention of vapor-compression cycle cooling was also a major innovation of this era, although until electricity became widely available its use was mostly constrained to steam-powered dairies in cities. This allowed for much denser and heavily mechanized industrial centers, as well greater population in warmer areas. The flush toilet and toilet paper also originated at this time.
*Vulcanized rubber arose during this era. While important for sealing and tires, one major change this facilitated was in clothing. The elastic waistband brought about modern undergarments among other things. The first plastics were invented in the 1860s, but these early plastics were brittle and had few practical uses, so the true rise of plastics would not be till the era of [[The World Wars]] and [[The Cold War|and beyond]].
*Food preservation made large advances. For most of human history, food preservation had been limited to drying (through methods including salt, smoke and/or sugar), pickling and (in climates that allowed it) freezing, all of which originated in the [[Bronze Age]] at the latest. Now methods like jarring and canning food emerged (though early sealing methods turned out to be toxic themselves), along with serious improvements to old methods like like quick freezing, the electric icemaker/freezer/refrigerator (domestic versions won't appear till the interwar period though), freeze-drying, and spray-drying, led to food that took up much less space while having lifespans measured in ''years''. These methods continue to be refined in [[Post-Cold War|the current era]], largely through new materials and understanding of microscopic organisms.
**To add to that, the invention of beef extract by the German chemist Justus von Liebig revolutionized the way food could be produced at larger scales at lower cost. It served as the catalyst for the invention of most modern processed foods and the birth of large scale food factories, where cheap food could be produced to feed an ever increasing amount of mouths, further accelerating the population boom that coincided with the improvement of healthcare as outlined below.
*The invention of modern medicine, which arguably started with the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis' research into childbed fever (a dangerous infection of the uterus through bacteria that enter the body after giving birth), delivered the modern template of how medical research is conducted (i.e. You make an observation, formulate an hypothesis based on that observation and employ a study with standardized sets of probands to prove or disprove your hypothesis). Combined with the with the first proof of how bacteria cause sickness through the German doctor Robert Koch and the subsequent triumph of medical hygiene, this newfound understanding of illnesses and plagues that had decimated entire civilizations in the millennia before led to a huge increase in birth rates and life expectancy for every human on the planet. As a result, the world population increased rapidly, starting in the 1850s, a trend that peaked in the 1960s and is continuously decreasing ever since (not that bad of a thing as one might think, with climate change, limited resources and all)
*The Scramble for Africa begins in 1881 and ends in 1914. Almost all modern "explorer" cliches and imagery began here; think Theodore Roosevelt's misadventures, Dr. Stanley Livingston of "I presume?" fame, or the Indiana Jones movies. The two main exceptions, the American frontiersman in his coonskin cap and breastplate-clad Spanish conquistador, are both strongly linked to a specific type and time instead of explorers in general. The stereotype of the great white hunter/explorer wearing a pith helmet, binoculars, and khaki overalls while hacking his way through the jungle with a big-ass knife in one hand and an elephant gun in the other started here.
*Human flight was first achieved in this era. In 1783 the first air balloon flight took place, and was first put to military use in 1794. The Wright Flyer took flight in late 1903, marking the first heavier than air flying machine. Zeppelins became practical just before World War I.
* Naval technology went through multiple revolutions. The wooden sailing ships of the Napoleonic Wars gave way to ironclad tallships with steam and sail propulsion, only to be replaced in turn by warships built entirely from steel. The famous duel of the ''Merrimack'' and the ''Monitor'' marked the end of wooden warships, the appearance of the steam launch ''Turbinia'' led to a transition to turbine engines, and HMS ''Dreadnought'' heralded the modern battleship. The first military submarines appeared in the American Revolution and Civil War, although the concept wouldn't be perfected until the Great War.
* The beginnings of feminism started in the 19th century, as women began to lobby for more access to their countries' social, political, and economic spheres. They scored some notable successes. In 1861, property-owning women in Victoria Australia could vote in local elections. In 1890 women gained the full franchise (but could not run for office) in New Zealand, while in 1893 full female suffrage was permitted in Colorado and 1902 saw federal suffrage in the new Commonwealth of Australia. By the late 19th century, the academic profession was opened up to women. It was still pretty damn sexist, but things were in motion.
* The Victorians (or at least those who could afford to do so) went in for elaborate periods of mourning. Not just a wake, funeral, and a catered lunch in formal wear while a funeral home gouges the family, or even sitting shiva for a week. A widow mourning her dear departed hubby was expected to wear black clothing and a veil, put up black ornamentation and wear black jewelry, and act reserved and solemn and so forth for a year. A lot of what we associate with death, mourning and similar subjects has its origins here and the Goths got a lot from it.
* Holiday travel and mass tourism also became a thing here. Though medieval peasants had gotten lots of days off for religious reasons, they typically didn't have much to do or anywhere to go on those days off, being as they were medieval peasants and more often than not used their free time to plow the land they actually owned themselves to prepare for winter. Rich people, of course, had always been able to travel pretty much anywhere they liked, which had led to the rise of the "Grand Tour", wherein young men (and occasionally women) of means would dick around Europe for a few months or years while receiving a classical education, taking in the local culture, and getting laid. The proliferation of railways, steamships, and middle-class jobs made travel a practicable concept for the masses for the first time, so that by the 1870s an average middle-class family could go to the country or the seaside for a vacation or even travel abroad on a package tour. The Grand Tour persisted for a while after this, thanks to ''nouveau riche'' Americans taking up the practice, but ultimately it fell out of favor as enthusiasm for classical culture declined.

==The appeal of the Industrial Revolution==
This era produced many things modern people take for granted and have difficulty considering life without. The rise of film and audio recording during this era and mass printing of advertisement and newspapers during this era mean there is no shortage of records of daily life, so this era is fairly well understood. Of particular note is that the late 1800s printed mail order catalogs started being printed, and these now provide quality information on everyday items, complete with cost and illustrations, that simply don't exist in earlier eras. Those researching earlier eras for this kind of thing have to go through the rare surviving records of estate sales, government orders and business transactions to get a ''fraction'' the understanding a layman can obtain from viewing a simple public domain catalog. These have proven such good resources some historically set RPGs outright say to find catalogs from companies like Bannerman (A surplus arms dealer so successful he built a castle on a private island next to West Point as an advertisement, since everyone traveling the Hudson had to see the sign on it), Montgomery Ward, and Sears Roebuck to fill in the blanks of the equipment list. Before this period, historians were mostly concerned with Big Things: wars, generals, kings, nobles, priests and the occasional artist, merchant, architect, engineer or inventor thrown in, often because there was so few records of the common man. In the Industrial Revolution historians became able and willing to adequately research the way people lived their lives day to day, from well-to-do merchants and skilled tradesmen to factory workers to scavengers picking through garbage for bones, rages, scraps of metal and dog turds to sell.

The Industrial Revolution allowed for inventors to not only create meaningful new creations, but see them become common overnight. [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Before the Industrial Revolution changes generally happened slowly with various small tweaks on things and methods, the compilation of said tweaks rolling over and the occasional breakthrough like the water wheel or gunpowder every once and a while which would take centuries to come into it's own]]. A peasant would assume that his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren would till the soil just as he did with what changes that did happen in his lifetime being largely minor stuff that tweaked the board but did not change the game. Industrialization changed all that, lives were changed for better or worse by mechanization suddenly and totally. Progress became an idea that would drive the world, even if problems were also mounting. People came to understand that the past was not just the present which happened beforehand and the future could be more than just more of the same. It's not surprising that science fiction started up in the 19th century, as did horror: Jules Verne, HG Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe were all active writers of the era.

This time was also one of upheaval socially and politically. Before the Industrial Revolution people generally operated on the idea that one should "Know One's Station", that society was divided into classes that were (with various degrees of legal formality enforcing this) hereditary, static and instead of trying to get out of them they should stay in them, stay out of the affairs of people of other classes and obey their betters. If you were a peasant you'd work for your lord, obey his orders, treat him with reverence as a higher form of human, be jolly grateful to have such a man as your master and avoid thinking about all that politics stuff which is none of your business. While this had not died out in the Industrial Revolution (see all of England's class stuff), it was on the decline both from gradual erosion and active resistance.

The source of wealth shifted from farms and fields to factories and companies which the merchant classes/bourgeois now owned. To be a noble you needed a peerage at least (in England that is, the rest of Europe, especially Spain and Germany remained static feudal societies at heart, while the French and eventually the Russians abolished it in a literally cutthroat fashion) and preferably a dozen generations of pedigree which your fellow nobs would respect even if you were broke, to be a captain of industry you just needed a lot of money invested in the right companies. It was possible for a poor man to rise to the highest echelons of society in the Industrial Revolution, see Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The downside of it was that these rich buggers tended to view the poor which could not rise from rags (ignoring of course how most of these ''nouveau riche'' then made it as difficult as possible for anyone to actually join their ranks) as being lazy incompetents that were only fit for ruthless exploitation and that attempting to help them out (beyond providing them with just enough education for them to do whatever work the rich needed them to do and healthy enough to keep working) was not only useless, but an active evil in the long term since it meant only more of them in the long run. To quote Charles Dickens' ''A Christmas Carol'':

''"Many cannot go there [Workhouses and Prisons] and many would rather die."''

''“If they'd rather die, they'd better do it and decrease the surplus population."''

The Industrial Revolution people had oppressive rigid order and stability swapped out for opportunities to excel and thrive or crash and burn. You could be born dirt poor and rise to riches, or you might start out as a skilled tradesmen who ends up as just another disposable factory worker.

That attitude about the poor went doubly so for the colonial subjects and non-white people in general. In 1876 there was a drought which led to crop failure in much of India, instead of importing food to feed the affected masses (which they'd done not long before successfully) the Raj Government allowed merchants to stockpile grain and sell it abroad to drive the price up. The result was famine and starvation which killed 6-10 million people. [[Grimdark|The Belgians in the Congo Free State made this look saintly by comparison.]]

Such treatment of the working class, combined with the belief that since the working class were the actual producers of wealth they should be the ones with the right to decide how the machines and materials used to make said wealth were used, would lead to Karl Marx writing the ''Communist Manifesto'':, creating [[communism]], one of the most notable ideologies of the 20th century and also one of the most [[skub|controversial]].

Ideologies aside you can boil down the Industrial Revolution social movements to the average human thinking: "Hey, we can actually make tons and tons of wondrous gadgets to make life better, but why is that I can't get some of the gadgets too so I can have a better life?". While this meme emerged first in West Europe and North America it inevitably expanded to the colonies and independent nations until it eventually covered the entire planet.

The Industrial Revolution is the start of the Modern World and many of its issues still persist to this day. People can relate to an Industrial Revolution era person more easily than that of a peasant in the Middle Ages, a serf in the Dark Ages, a citizen soldier of the Classical Era, a scribe at a pharaoh's court, a priest king in the Fertile Crescent or Grug and his rocks. The downside of this is that these issues are still politically charged to this day.

===Fantasy Relevance===
As a tangent from the historical to the literary, the Industrial Revolution is something which often looms in the background of Fantasy at a meta level with various degrees of overtness. The implication is that sooner or latter as the elves in splendid cities and ancient forests weave their spells and loose their arrows, the dwarves delve and hold the line to defend their mountain homes, the orcs sound the drums of war and sharpen their blades for battle, dragons soar, necromancers scheme, kings reign, adventurers set out on epic quests and all that fantastic wonder, somewhere someone notices a pot on the boil rattling its lid and imagines how the force of pressurized steam could be used, setting in motion the end of that era. Yes, that's a gross oversimplification of a centuries long processes with many intermediate steps that culminated with Locomotives and the Crystal Palace. The point still stands that in a world where people like us exist, eventually observant souls, those inclined to tinker, those looking to make work easier and increase productivity and those who can see the work of such inventive souls as the keys to wealth and power will figure these things out and move a society beyond the 15th century with those which refuse to move with the times getting rolled over.

In Tolkien's work this fact is dealt with mostly in subtext of disdain (the industrialists of Middle Earth were villains and the results of their labors were ruin and destruction) and a sense of melancholy as past ages end. In other fantasy settings such as [[Forgotten Realms]] there are forces working to stop this, ranging from organizations like the harpers to the Gods enforcing [[Medieval Stasis]]. Some settings, like [[Discworld]] and to a smaller degree [[Warhammer Fantasy]], accept that this will happen and have the transition woven into their worldbuilding. In fact you can see Pratchett's later works as an answer to Tolkien's criticism towards modernity, while oversimplified in some aspects the Moist von Lipwig Trilogy makes some good explanations towards how industrialization emerged and how it works as well as its potential flaws and shortcomings without going full ludite.

==Industrial Revolution inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* [[Steampunk]]
* Much of Discworld
* Thief series which are set in a weird blend of medieval fantasy and early industrial revolution.
* [[Eberron]] before the Last War. After it Eberron is a cross between Industrial Revolution and interwar.
* [[Arcanum]] is a magical world that is currently undergoing a revolution.
* [[Iron Kingdoms]]'s whole schtick is that it's a typical fantasy setting that developed into this.
* The [[Skaven]], particularly their Weapons Teams and anything related to [[Clan Skryre]]. Thankfully one of the reasons why they never achieved world domination in one fell swoop is the overall lack of quality control on their gadgets.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Industrial Revolution

2023-05-16T14:04:21Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Notes */

[[File:Steam engine in action.gif|300px|thumb|right|Knights clash, Nobles Plot, Kings Proclaim and Priests Preach. But for all their ambition, passion, glory, drive and zeal it's a few modestly well off men trying to figure out how to better drain flooded mines that change the world]]
{{topquote|The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.|Arthur Conan Doyle}}
{{topquote|The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.|Opening line of a [[meme|copypasta]] that [[lulz|goes on to detail all the good things that have come from it]].}}
The '''Industrial Revolution''' was a period from about 1776 to 1914 which proved to be a major game changer for humanity. Many periods of history are laid out arbitrarily by historians for book-keeping purposes. An English peasant born at the tail end of the [[High Middle Ages]] in 1340 who was lucky enough to see the beginning of the [[Renaissance]] about 90 years later most likely wouldn't think that the world at the time of his birth was all that different from the one in which he died, even if he was glad that the whole "everybody's dropping dead of plague" spell did not come back. The same would not be true if said English fellow was born in 1780 and died in 1870. In that time the majority of people had moved from the countryside to cities, factories were making everything, you could cross the country in a train in a day and send a message to newfangled Dominion of Canada at the speed of light.

==Technology==
[[Image:Victorian factory.jpg|thumb|Right|400px|A Victorian Factory, Watch your Hands]]
The big thing of note here is energy. For most of the history of civilization, if humans wanted to do something like move a heavy object from point A to Point B, dig a hole, grind grain, work iron, or whatever else, they had to do it with muscle power, either their own, other peoples' or draft animals like oxen and horses. Later, they worked out how to put wind and flowing water to use with sails, watermills and windmills. These things were useful in their own right and by the 1700s they were used in a wide variety of operations, but both had serious limitations. There are only so many rivers where you can build water-powered mills and even in windy places there are calm days, so they primarily supplemented good hold man/horsepower. A human can produce about 100 watts (joules per second) of motive power continuously, while a horse can provide about 750 watts. In contrast a kilogram of wood produces about 16-21 megajoules of energy when burned and coal has about 30 megajoules, which comes in the form of heat. Steam engines use boiling water to turn that heat into motive force which can operate factory machines, propel ships and locomotives to carry cargo, dig ditches and more. Once they had been refined to a level of practical efficiency, steam engines forever changed the nature of how work got done. First this was done by belts, gears, and rods, and later by electrical power generated by steam (or other sources) turning generators to power electric motors and lights.

One of the key advances of the Industrial Revolution was the assembly line, which allowed rapid construction of goods by giving each worker a single task to be repeated instead of requiring they have specialized knowledge of the whole process. While this idea goes back to at least the Venetian Arsenal in the Middle Ages, it became the standard during this era thanks to breakthroughs in milling, grinding, and lathing metal powered by steam (these machines were also a pre-requisite for the creation of precision instruments, without which you can't even make the machines that make the machines that make the final product). One side effect of making things on an assembly line is that items were broken into interchangeable parts that were replaceable if they broke, where before repairs were specialized work done by craftsmen, if they could be accomplished at all. The assembly line ultimately led to the proliferation of cheap automobiles, which revolutionized the concept of personal transport; the most prominent example was the Ford Model T, which was the first inexpensive mass-market automobile and remains one of the most-sold cars in history. These early cars all had unique controls and the modern, standardized control layout would not be invented until 1916 and would not achieve popularity until after 1922. Likewise, while assembly line techniques blossomed in the late 19th and early 20th century, it wouldn't be until World War II that quality control was tight enough that parts were interchangeable between factories.

Education also improved and became more universal during this era. By 1800 literacy was near universal in the United States, though this figure may not be counting slaves. Indeed, high literacy was critical to the American Revolution, which made extensive use of mass-printed propaganda like ''[[Wikipedia:Common Sense (pamphlet)|Common Sense]]''. Public education further improved these literacy rates. Democracy would gradually rise in prominence during this period thanks to increased literacy. The abolition of slavery and women's emancipation would also make serious progress during this era as an extension of the rise in literacy.

Photography was invented in the early 1800s and perfected by the 1840s, when Louis Daguerre invented the process he so humbly named after himself. The proliferation of cheap and (relatively) easily reproduced photographic images took the world by storm. Souvenir and formal photographs became a big business, along with the much creepier death photos (since it took a few minutes to capture a photo with the daguerreotype process, some people found it easier to pose a dead person than to get a live one to sit still). Battlefield photographs from the American Civil War brought the brutality of war into the public eye for the first time. Film recording also got its start during the Industrial Revolution, with the first stroboscopic animations appearing in the 1830s and stereoscopic viewers emerging a decade later. The real revolution came when Eadweard Muybridge worked out how to display a series of static photographs as a single moving image, followed swiftly by George Eastman's invention of the first photographic film in 1884 and the development of the first motion picture cameras by Louis LePrince in 1887. Other inventors and pioneers like Emile Reynaud, Ottomar Anschütz, Robert W. Paul, the Lumiere brothers, and Georges Méliès furthered the technology and brought cinema to the masses for the first time.

Weapons technology advanced by leaps and bounds. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, the average soldier was armed with a smoothbore flintlock musket that could be shot maybe four times a minute and was accurate to a hundred yards at most. Breech-loading rifles came around very shortly into the period, though the complexity of the mechanism made large scale manufacture impossible. Guns became mass produced (and were among the first complex machines with metal mechanisms to be so), but over the early 19th century rifling became standard and switched over to percussion cap firing mechanisms and were complemented by the first mass-produced revolvers. Starting in 1848, muskets began being phased out for breech-loading rifles. Metallic cartridges and smokeless powder would arrive towards the end of this era. Since black powder would rapidly foul any repeating action, smokeless powder was critical to the function of any self-loading firearm. Machine guns made their first appearance in the 1880s with Sir Hiram Maxim's invention of his namesake gun. Self-loading pistols emerged as well. Artillery advanced from simple iron tubes firing iron balls or canister rounds straight ahead to breech-loading steel guns which fired high-explosive shells on predictable ballistic trajectories.

Of course, there was a downside. Industrialization did generate a lot of wealth, but not everyone profited from it. Rural landlords found that their fields were full of surplus farmhands who weren't needed and promptly kicked them off their land to go live in dirty overcrowded cities full of cheaply made apartments into which people were crammed like sardines. To get enough to survive, everyone in a poor family older than six would have to work in hellish, unsafe conditions for 12 hours or more, often operating dangerous machines that could maim or kill an unwary operator in the heat, dark, stink and noise of it all while their bosses [[Wikipedia:Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire|forcibly locked their workers into the building]].

There were various responses to these conditions, some of which were more extreme than others. The best-known of these is the concept of the labor union, which allowed for workers in the same industry to group together and demand better working conditions from their employers. This era also saw the rise of regulations against child labor, improved safety standards and so forth. And of course, there was the enormous amount of pollution and general environmental destruction, whose effects are coming back to bite us in the ass a little over a century later. It was a legendary problem even then; the famed "London fog" that you see in every Victorian-era depiction of the city was caused by every house and business in London burning coal for heat, kicking vast amounts of soot and pollutants into the air and generating thick, toxic smog.

==Napoleonic Wars==
{{topquote|All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.|Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, ''Why Nations Fail''}}

{{topquote|In early life he may have been a sincere republican; but he hated anarchy and disorder, and, before his campaign in Italy was over, he had begun to plan to make himself ruler of France. He worked systematically to transform the people's earlier ardor for liberty into a passion for military glory and plunder.|Willis Mason West}}

Imagine a world where Tom Cruise succeeded in killing Hitler and then Rommel proceeded to do all the conquering that Hitler promised to do except without all the genocide, only to lose it all by invading Russia in winter. Replace Hitler with Maximilien Robespierre and Rommel with Napoleon Bonaparte and that's basically the Napoleonic Wars.

France was a shit place to live if you were a peasant and always had been, but the 1790s were particularly shitty. Like "why is my bread made of sawdust" shitty (no, really, that happened). Seeing that America had done all right for itself after throwing out the [[monarchy]], a bunch of French people decided they had nothing to lose and tried the same. Things got a little [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror out of hand] as they [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre tend to in France] and before long a young military officer decided that the best course of action was to shoot some protesters with cannons, and the country loved him for it.

Now that he was in control, [[Emprah|Emperor Napoleon]] had a relatively short to-do list: Lead and shape <s>Man</s>Frenchkind <s>into a psychic race</s> and surpass the <s>Eldar</s> '''Romans''' by learning from their mistakes, unite Humanity under one aegis and allow for <s>instant</s> communication and travel <s>across all human inhabited worlds</s>, kill literally every <s>Xenos</s> Brit(is there really much of a difference?) and most importantly, prevent another calamity like the Age of Strife or Fall of the <s>Eldar</s> '''Roman Empire'''.

Five coalitions were raised against the Emperor's Great Crusade, and each was smashed to pieces by his <s>Astartes</s> '''Horse Artillery''' and the <s>Solar Auxilia</s> '''Garde Impériale'''. This went on until the Emperor was betrayed by <s>Horus</s> '''the weather'''. In the disastrous invasion of <s>Isstvan V</s> '''Russia''', the Grand Army would suffer 80% losses, many due to freezing to death.

While Napoleon would fight against two more coalitions against him, the defeat in Russia would prove to be the beginning of the end.

To fund these wars Napoleon sold the United States a '''huge''' chunk of land that's now known as the Louisiana Purchase. This was actually controversial in the United States at the time since it wasn't ''explicitly'' allowed by the Constitution of the United States. The sheer size of the acquisition surprised nearly everyone except Napoleon; the negotiators sent by President Jefferson were only looking to acquire New Orleans and access to the Mississippi. Napoleon was eager to divest himself of his New World holdings because they were more trouble than they were worth (a lesson Spain never took to heart and the British only after a very long time); this was shortly after France embarrassingly lost Haiti to the world's first (and so far only) successful large-scale slave revolt. Ultimately, the argument that the power to make treaties was sufficient to make a treaty exchanging money for land won out and American settlers soon flooded the largely undeveloped land. Another lasting consequence was that Napoleon's government offered a large reward for anyone who could develop a cost-effective method of preserving food. Nicolas Appert claimed this prize when he discovered that food cooked in sealed jars would last for a long time (even though he admittedly had no clue why it worked). This would eventually be refined into canning.

The key to Napoleons success on the battlefield was mainly due to two factors. The first was that he abolished the system of purchasing military ranks, which was the norm for all other European states at the time. It didn't matter if you never even saw a musket in your life, if you laid down 10.000 Francs, you were a General of his majesty now, congratulations. Napoleon abolished this entirely, granting ranks and the prestige that came with them exclusively through merit. If you were a compentent commander, it didn't matter how high your birth or how thick your briefcase was, you could rise all the way to the top to become of Napoleons famous Marshals (although that didn't stop Napoleon from engaging in some dubious nepotism here and there - in the end, two of his brothers ended up becoming Marshals too and his son-in-law not just a Marshal, but also King of Naples). This in turn not only guaranteed that his armies and divisions were lead by the crème dé la crème of his Generals, but also increased the morale and motivation of his troops dramatically, beyond just the patriotic fervor of the years prior. Whereas the soldiers of Russia, Prussia or Austria were mostly impoverished farmhands or unlucky vagrants, pressed into uniforms and drilled until the last vestiges of humanity were stripped away, Napoleons soldiers were proud, willing to take risks and hungry for glory and promotions.

The second was that he revolutionized logistics and offensive tactics. Napoleon can arguably even be credited with inventing the basic concept of modern maneuver warfare from whole cloth. To give some context: Armies during the tail end of the 18th century usually moved in large, single formations, which mainly served the purpose of stopping any of the aformentioned pressganged sods from deserting too early. The thought of splitting up into smaller forces didn't really occur to the strategists of that time since the sense of honour put an emphasis on big, decisive single battles with little room for skirmishes. Such a big, central force had to be upkept, so they carried a sizeable chunk of civilians with them (it wasn't unheard of that the total amount of people moving in an army were at least half of the fielded manpower): metalworkers to repair cannons, smiths to make nails and horseshoes, the actual wives and children of many soldiers in the army and also, what might seem utterly bizarre to us today, people that could only be described as tourists. Napoleon did away with the civilians in his armies entirely, keeping only a number of specialists like sappers and engineers on hand, preferring to instead aquire (yes, aquire, civilians that had their possessions lifted in this system were entitled to compensation after the fighting was over and looting was heavily punished) their supplies from the cities and countryside he marched through. This gave him a massive advantage in operational flexibility and allowed him to march quicker into advantageous positions or exploit the flanks of his enemies. Another advantage of this system was that it allowed Napoleon to split his forces up into smaller divisions and corps that had permission to act independently from the main force and when opportunity arose. A common theme of diary entries of Generals that fought against Napoleon was how he always managed to take them by surprise in places they least expected attacks from. It has to be said though that Napoleons massive skill as a micromanager was often the single part that kept this machine going; in theaters were he wasn't personally involved, it generally fell apart when less competent commanders tried to do the same and felt overwhelmed in the face of the flow of information and constant decisionmaking they had to process, like in Spain and during the retreat out of Russia.

===The War of 1812===
The young USA would engage in its own concurrent fight against the British. In 1812, the U.S. declared war on the British over press-ganging of American sailors... two days after the British put a stop to it (transatlantic communication at the time could go no faster than transatlantic ships, which took roughly two months). The official ''casus belli'' aside, the real reason the United States declared war on Britain was in retaliation for British support of Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederation and a desire to conquer Canada. Despite terrible results for the US on land, which saw the White House burned down by Canadians, the U.S. did better than expected on the naval front. Even with Napoleon tying up most of the Royal Navy, the hastily raised and underfunded U.S. Navy matching them was a serious accomplishment.

One especially notable U.S. vessel was the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_floating_battery_Demologos United States floating battery ''Demologos''] (retroactively renamed the ''Fulton'' after its creator), the first documented steam warship. However, the principle muscle of the USN was the nation's first six frigates, originally constructed to fight the Barbary pirates. Although they were relatively old ships by the start of the war, they were still well armed, sturdy, exceptionally fast for their weight and virtually cannon-proof due to their composite-armor-like hulls, built from American live oak instead of comparatively flimsy European wood. This is where USS ''Constitution'' got her nickname of "Old Ironsides"; during a battle with HMS ''Guerriere'', one of her crewmen watched shot after shot bounce off ''Constitution'''s hull like a Tau punching a Space Marine and famously shouted "Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!" After a string of high profile defeats the Royal Navy forbade their captains to engage them with less than a two-to-one advantage.

In December 1814 both sides declared peace since they weren’t getting anywhere and the original cause for the war was no longer applicable. On 8 January 1815 [sic] the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans Battle of New Orleans] was fought and ended in an overwhelming U.S. victory, despite the war already being over (see the above point of communication being slow).

==Transportation==
In 1800, if you wanted to get from point A to point B your options were limited. You could always walk, in which case you might be able to cover maybe 50 kilometers a day at 4kph if you're in good health and traveling light. Catching a lift on a farm wagon was about as fast, but it's not you doing the walking. If you had the cash, you might use a stagecoach, drawn by a team of horses which were regularly swapped out and could go along at 13-16kph if the roads were good (and that's a big If). A sailing ship might be able to match that speed if there was favorable conditions (and that was a big if) and would be on the move 24 hours a day. Most people of the period lived their whole lives without going more than 30km from their birthplace; travel was the domain of elites, the wealthy, merchants and their associates, and armies on the march. While there had been refinements (some of which were fairly substantial, especially with ships) this basic set-up had been the case since the Bronze Age. But this ancient order would soon be overturned by steam power.

First there were steamboats with experiments starting in the 1700s in Britain, France and America. It was a fairly straightforward idea: take a boat, slap a steam engine in it, hook it up to a paddle wheel and hope that nothing catches fire or blows up. By the early 1800s there were some steam tugboats. By the 1810s there were paddleboats handling cargo on canals and rivers. By the 1820s there were experimental steamships which could cross the Atlantic mostly using engine power and by the 1830s there were regular transatlantic crossings. The big advantage of a steamship over a sailboat was that it could sail straight into the wind without giving a shit. Voyages that could take months at full sail could be done in a week. Even so sailing ships still persisted for some time in some roles as they did not need their coal bunkers topped off all the time.

Self-powered ships were a big deal for maritime trade, but on land something new rolled down the lines. Steam locomotives started put hauling carts in English and coal mines, then upgraded in 1826 to moving freight and passengers. In 1829, Stephenson's Rocket managed to achieve the ''amazing'' overland speed of 48 kph. Things only escalated from there. By the 1830s, there was a full blown railway boom in the UK as rail lines snaked their way over the British Isles and their colonies. The US followed soon after, then the French and gradually the Germans, Spanish, Russians, Italians and so forth got in on the game. For the United States in particular railways shaped the cultural landscape of the country. Chicago and several other cities went from podunk towns to major cities thanks to their use as a rail hub and expansion of the rail network west was a key tool in settling the frontier. The same applied to Canada with the Canadian Pacific. The big American rail companies also became massively powerful [[Megacorporation]]s in the modern sense. In the latter of half of the century, trams and trolleys began to emerge for use inside cities, providing the forerunner to modern public transit services.

From moving Iowa grain and bananas from Havana to the European market to sparking the beginnings of tourism to the creation of the first suburbs, both steamships and railways transformed national economies and the ways people lived and worked. They also changed warfare. Steamships could easily outmaneuver and outrun pure sailing vessels; on land trains could easily move soldiers and supplies in huge numbers.

This was also the time when humanity first took to the air. The first hot-air balloons appeared in the late 18th century and were gradually refined. In 1852 the French built a hydrogen balloon with a small steam engine, allowing the operator to move it about as he wished. Further experiments were made through the latter half of the 19th century with lighter than air flight. At the same time, inventors began to work with gliders to achieve heavier than air flight. Despite the claims of a few derpy dorks forever consigned to be laughingstocks that heavier than air flight was impossible for humans, the Wright Brothers managed to achieve powered flight in 1903.

=== Communications ===
Similarly communications made quantum leaps ahead. When the Founding Fathers signed the Constitution, you sent a message long distance by writing it down and giving it to either a courier on horseback or a ship. This meant that it would take months for news to get from China to Britain and vice versa for the reply.

The first optical telegraph system was built in 1793, and the French Empire under Napoleon greatly expanded this network and made good use of its ability to transmit signals across great distances. The electrical telegraph evolved during the same time period, but the British and French initially ignored it because they thought the optical system was just fine. This didn't stop inventors from refining and perfecting the device, and the first commercial electric telegraph came online in 1837, with widespread adoption occurring shortly thereafter. Undersea cables were laid across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific, connecting the world for the first time. Early versions of telex and fax machines used the technology as well. Interestingly enough, the Telegraph was in some ways like a proto-internet. It was operated by a network of users which formed their own community with romances, chatter and memes, users contrived elaborate systems of coding to convey lots of information with a few words and while people could make massive amount of money off it either by running companies or getting up-to-date information on world potato prices it was also a prime vehicle for fraud and other such skullduggery.

In the 1890s came Guglielmo Marconi and wireless telegraphy, which quickly became the standard comms equipment for ships and is the main reason anyone survived the sinking of the ''Titanic''. Alongside this came the discovery of radio waves, which went quickly from experimental technology to cheap, mass-produced sets. The telephone was also invented in the late 19th century.

==Meiji Revolution ==
{{topquote|智識ヲ世界ニ求メ大ニ皇基ヲ振起スべシ (Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.)|Meiji Charter Oath}}
[[Image:Meiji era Train.jpg|Railways come to the land of the Rising Sun, memorialized in Woodcut|thumb|right|300px]]
During the Age of Exploration, Japan had closed its borders to most of the outside world to prevent foreign influence (even going so far as to kill castaways, missionaries and their converts - even Japanese sailors who were rescued by foreign ships were prevented from returning home), and for a time, the Shogunate was successful in preventing Europeans from encroaching on Japan like they had in so many other parts of the world. This came to a crashing halt over 200 years later on the 8th of July 1853. The USS ''Mississippi'' and some other American ships arrived in Edo to deliver a message from US President (at the time of the Mississippi's departure) Millard Fillmore requesting the reopening of trade. The ''Mississippi'' and its companions returned on the 12th of February 1854 and led to the Convention of Kanagawa in March (funny enough, Fillmore's term in office was over before this). There were other developments like the British bombing a port in revenge for a murdered businessman, said port's rulers in the Satsuma domain agreeing to pay reparations by buying warships, having been thoroughly impressed by their firepower, the assassination of the Shogun's number two Ii Naosuke and an attempt to burn the Imperial Palace. This led to a weakening of the ruling Shogunate that allowed Emperor Meiji to seize back power in the violent but swift Boshin War in 1868, permanently ending the Shogunate and the feudal system that had ruled Japan for centuries. The die-hard Shogunate loyalists briefly declared a Republic but they were defeated at Hakodate in the final weeks of the war. One of the foremost Imperial samurai and part of the ruling triumvirate under the Emperor, Saigo Takamori, led his home domain of Satsuma into a brief rebellion after disagreeing with some of the reforms and the triumvirate falling apart with one of them dying of illness and Saigo being rivals with the other guy. During the Battle of Shiroyama Saigo's last charge, mortal wounding and assisted seppuku, followed by the final charge of his 50 remaining followers marked the end of the samurai in the face of conscripted peasants with rifles and cannons. With the last of the big three being assassinated by ex-samurai after the Rebellion, ironically not far from where Naosuke had been shot and decapitated, it was over.

The new Meiji government, not wanting to be consumed and dismembered by the Western powers as many other Asian countries already had, undertook a rapid adoption of Western technology and, eventually, started doing some empire building of its own. On the one hand, the fact that a formerly isolated nation could go from a feudal backwater to a competitive modern nation in just a scant few decades was remarkable. On the other hand, the need to maintain Japan's power to prevent Western imperialism from getting all up in their shit directly led to Japan's own growing military autocracy. Military success against China in 1894, and against Russia in 1905 combined to put Japan on the world stage. The latter conflict especially put the West on notice; everyone had expected Russia to curb-stomp the Japanese, only for the Japanese to kick the shit out of the Russians on land and win an absolutely crushing victory at sea in the Battle of Tsushima. Nearly the entire Russian fleet was wiped out in exchange for three Japanese gunboats and a handful of casualties, one of whom was future admiralissimo Isoroku Yamamoto (he lost two fingers to a bit of shrapnel and would have been discharged if he'd lost a third). The architect of this grand victory, Admiral Heihachiro Togo, was celebrated as a national hero, and his flagship ''Mikasa'' is preserved as a museum in Yokosuka. While the samurai as a class lost their traditional power of free money and being able to execute disrespectful peasants, enough of them saw the writing on the wall that they found positions in the new order, using the wealth and education that their families had accumulated to enter politics, the military academy, or found many modern institutions one would recognize today, such as Mitsubishi.

==The American Civil War==
{{topquote|We are [[Grimdark|not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people]], and [[Exterminatus|must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war]].|William Tecumseh Sherman preparing to [[Rip and Tear|go absolutely fucking scorched earth]]}}

The American Civil War is one of those subjects that we could write a shit ton about, but one we could never do the due diligence to be 100% accurate to the events. Needless to say, this is our humble attempt to cover the subject. If nothing else, just know it wasn't about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy| States Rights.]

Shortly after achieving independence, a distinction between the newly United States became more and more pressing. The southern colonies had been settled by men who wanted to make a lot of money in the New World and who set up plantations manned by slaves growing tobacco and cotton. The desire to present a united front in the writing of the constitution compromised with the slave states in giving them extra political power a la the 3/5ths compromise, where somewhere around 60% of the black population counted towards a seat in the House of Representatives. Of course, they wouldn't dare let the people who are giving them more power from sharing said power except by making money. The northern colonies were settled by groups who wanted to recreate England (or their ideal version thereof) where the cash crops grown on plantations were not profitable and to whom slavery increasingly became morally repugnant and was perceived as economically unfair.

There was some hope that slavery was on its way out at first (many of the Founding Fathers had believed that the growth of industrialization and the declining price of tobacco would make slavery obsolete and thus left the problem for future generations to solve), and then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made it much easier to process cotton and allowed for the vast expansion of cotton plantations, leading the slave owners to become very wealthy and invest their profits in buying more slaves to pick more cotton. Even those who did not profit directly from slavery still supported the institution, if only because they were terrified of the possibility of a slave revolt or an outright race war, as had been the case in Haiti just a few decades prior.

There was also a growing sense of abolitionism in the North. The British had shut down their transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in 1833, with France following in 1848. While the number of hard-line abolitionists in the North was comparatively small, they were making headway and there were various groups opposed to slavery to various degrees. Tensions rose gradually in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, from "mere" outright brawls in the United States Senate to the "Bleeding Kansas" incident, to John Brown's attempted slave revolt at Harper's Ferry. This led to the Southern states attempting to create new slave states as fast as possible and other ploys which spiraled things out until South Carolina decided to secede, and James Buchanan refusing to do anything because he sympathized with the southern cause. Fearing that "The Peculiar Institution" would be contained, constrained, and eventually brought to inevitable extinction, the powers that be in the South pushed for a violent breakaway. This in spite of the fact that Lincoln had historically sought compromise as opposed to taking a hard line on the issue, something that changed as the war progressed.

This war is notable for being the most destructive conflict to take place within the United States, killing 700,000 and leveling several cities, and was among one of the biggest wars that was fought between industrial powers up to that point. One reason for this is that the North simultaneously held that South never left the US and that a total war with intentional targeting of the civilian population and infrastructure was OK. Another was a fear among the North that if the war was not won quickly (regardless of cost in lives) public opinion on it would sour, Lincoln would lose reelection and the war might end without the South's defeat.

The war consisted broadly of two halves, cleanly divided by the Battle of Gettysburg. The first half was characterized by a series of grand maneuver battles in the east in which the Confederates tended to win on account of all the more competent, professional generals picked their side, most notably the [[skub|legendary]] [[tactical genius]] Robert E. Lee, while the Union had to make do with politicians, corrupt hacks, and old men left over from the War of 1812. Morale was also an important factor; the Confederates tended to be on the average much more motivated, as they were carried by a deep belief that they were fighting a defensive war, something that was amplified in Confederate propaganda. The Union forces, on the other hand were mostly comprised of poor sods from the slums of New English cities like New York that couldn't afford the 100 dollars(12 bucks today) to rid themselves of being conscripted. In some other cases, soldiers were recruited straight from the ships that carried numerous European immigrants, and among these the Irish were the most prominent. A vicious cycle ensued where every moron Lincoln gave command to would boldly set out to conquer Richmond and end the war in one stroke, only to run into Lee playing tower defense on the most unfair terrain available. Union Commander of the Month would furiously throw men at Lee's lines until the grumbling from the ranks started to sound mutinous (Fredericksburg, Manassas, the Peninsula) or just stare at his lines until getting blindsided outta fucking nowhere, usually by Stonewall Jackson (Chambersburg, Chancellorsville, Second Manassas).

Either way, it'd end with the Union sulking back to Washington with about 2/3rds the army they started with. This would repeat several times until eventually Lee got cocky and tried the same thing (Gettysburg and technically Antietam although that was more of a really bloody draw). By the time of Gettysburg, there were Union soldiers (the remnants of the 2nd Maine for example) who could accurately claim to [[Fail|have gone 0 for 11 against the Army of Northern Virginia]]. At Gettysburg, however, shit went sideways for the Confederates in a big way. General Meade, a halfway competent general, was finally in charge on the Union side, Stonewall Jackson was dead, Jeb Stuart took his cavalry off on a pointless ride to nowhere, the Army of the Potomac found and occupied some of the best defensive terrain of the war, and the Army of Northern Virginia couldn't lever them out of it despite two days of very bloody fighting. This culminated in Lee picking out some of his best divisions and ordering them to charge up the middle of the Union position, supported by all his artillery. The Union army sat and waited for the the Confederates to finish shooting, then chewed the attacking divisions up with volley fire and artillery like a Carnifex brood tearing through Imperial conscripts. The attack actually breached the Union line, but was smashed and driven back with heavy casualties. The point the Confederates reached on Cemetery Hill is now known as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
[[Image:ShermansMarch.jpg|[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufSGd58gjAM M-i-c, k-e-y, m-o-u-s-e. Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?]|thumb|right|250px]]
However, the Western Theater was a different story; a pair of grimdark badasses named Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were leading the Union on a steady slog of wins up and down the Mississippi River system. Though there were some touch and go moments, such as at Shiloh, Grant kept his head and his command and ultimately masterminded the successful Vicksburg campaign, which saw him outflank the city after ordering his fleet to do a balls-out run past its defensive batteries before bitchslapping the Confederate defenders back into their trenches and settling in for a siege that lasted until 4 July 1863, the day after Pickett's Charge was shot to pieces at Gettysburg. Losing Vicksburg and New Orleans cut the Confederacy in half and gave the Union unchallenged control of the entire Mississippi, the most important interior waterway in the country. After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln scented blood in the air, decided he just wanted to win and didn't care how messy it got, and so gave Grant command of the Army of the Potomac. Grant knew that the Union had more men and more equipment, and if he couldn't outmaneuver Lee, he was perfectly content to [[Imperial Guard|win by attrition]]. Grant sent Sherman rampaging through Georgia like an [[Eversor]] with flamers, and then settled in for a year of meatgrinder trench warfare with Lee that was basically just World War One without biplanes and machine guns.

It has to be noted: Grant was not just a "mindless butcher". He had terrible casaulty figures to be sure, but there were reasons for this: One is that Grant had noticed that the Confederates kept beating the Union by whipping them, then waiting to recover, then repeat. So the only real way to deny this to the Confederacy and especially Lee was to keep fighting and keep Lee's Army reeling, preventing any real reinforcement or supply to restore the lost men and material. Grant was bold, and displayed excellent leadership characteristics and a coolness under pressure. So cool, that part of the reason for his victory in the Wilderness campaign was because Lee lost his cool and flung men at a position and expected them to win the day. Yeah, Lee had a habit of this, and it's part of the reason that his reputation as a "tactical genius" is [[skub|hotly debated]] to this day.

While the war was started over the issue of slavery, complete emancipation was not one of the North's original war aims. However, as more Southern territory fell to the Union advance, thousands of slaves came into the custody of the Union army, either by being liberated directly or by making a break for it as soon as the bluecoats were close enough. This became troublesome in the latter years of the war, as it presented the Northern generals with a serious logistical and humanitarian challenge: feed not only a fighting army on the move, but their ever-growing train of liberated slaves. This problem was particularly acute for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea Sherman's March to the Sea]. Some Union generals addressed this problem by offering enlistment to liberated slaves, although this practice was not universal. However, many slaves fled Confederate territory to join up with Union forces and a good number of them ended up serving in the Union Army, including the legendary 54th Massachusetts. Ending slavery not only became political policy, but also a weapon of war since it destroyed the Confederacy's economy. This led to the Emancipation Proclamation, issued after Gettysburg, and eventually the adoption of the 13th Amendment and with it the abolition of slavery. The vileness of slavery became more known as Union soldiers saw firsthand the plantations and what it did to black people, and while some didn't give a shit or even thought it was only natural, there were plenty who saw that shit and resolved to send the Confederates straight to hell for it.

==The American Frontier==
{{topquote|You have died of dysentery.|''The Oregon Trail''}}
Throughout the mid 1800s Americans spread rapidly westward. This was aided by several large land purchases such as the aforementioned Lousiana Purchase; this was a huge step for the young nation as they now had a major highway (The Mississippi River) linking the entire back country from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico. But said expansion would only accelerate after a little incident south of the border where American settlers living in the Texas territory got fed up with the Mexican government and seceded the entire territory north of the Rio Grande. Texas joined the Union and Mexico gave up a bunch of land after getting its ass kicked. This led the United States to stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Fueling this was several gold rushes and a series of Homestead Acts, which gave ownership of land for free if you lived on it and maintained it. Canada also had a western frontier at the same time, but that part isn't nearly as well remembered (Did you play Yukon Trail? Did you even know it existed?). Huge waves of settlers were eager to reach the newly claimed California and Oregon territories, but before any railroads were laid down, they had to travel by wagon through the barren and hostile wilderness in between, with many would-be settlers dying to disease, hypothermia, hyperthermia, attacks from upset Native American tribes, and in at least one infamous case, [[Wikipedia:Donner_Party|cannibalism]].

This era has long been dramatized to the point it has become its own genre, the Western. This goes so far back ''[[Wikipedia:The Great Train Robbery (1903 film)|The Great Train Robbery]]'', one of the first films with a narrative '''ever''', was a western. Westerns dramatized the "Wild" West as a chaotic wasteland full of bandits and savages where a man would be killed for any or no reason, but historically this was not the case. Statistically the west was actually very peaceful outside of the wars, especially compared to cities out east. The big outlaws, shootouts and murders were simply very publicized '''because''' they were unusual. Still, many of these more famous incidents showed how loose the power of the law was out in the frontier, as in several cases, you had several figures who had been on both sides of the law (Billy the Kid’s Regulators, Wyatt Earp’s revenge ride, etc) usually due to conflicting interests between locally powerful factions.

==The Unification of Germany==
{{topquote|The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.|Otto von Bismarck about the unification of Germany}}

One of the aftereffects of Napoleon's brief stint into making France the all-encompassing superpower of Europe was that he motivated quite a lot of people to identify themselves with their nation instead of families or rulers. The place where this nascent idea of nationalism reverberated the most were the German states, which had been notorious for their disunity since the age of Charlemagne. Liberal and nationalist ideas that sought to unify Germany into one nation ultimately culminated in a series of revolutions that all failed until Prussia, under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck (a man with a political genius as massive as his mustache), kicked the Austrians out of the German territories and won a war against France in 1871.

The Franco-Prussian War, incidentally, had not a lot to do with Germany in itself. The southern German states (Hesse, Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria) that were still independent from Prussia at this point, leaned towards Austria. Instead it was about... Spain. Spain? What does fucking Spain have to do with Germany? Well Spain had a lot of issues at the time, the most pressing of which that it was a colonial power with no monarchy; their previous queen had been removed from power by a coup. After [[Blam|order had been restored]], the question remained whose dynasty should ascend to the Spanish throne. One of the proposed candidates was Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a scion of a branch of the Prussian royal family that remained Catholic. France was very paranoid about being outmaneuvered by the Germans and sought to prevent that, but Bismarck carefully manipulated a series of events, including the careful redacting and publication of a diplomatic telegram to make it seem as if the French had pressured the Prussian King to withdraw Leopold's candidacy for the Spanish throne (when in reality Leopold had already declined to Wilhelm) to lure France into a war with Prussia and the German states. [[Just as planned|And it worked.]] The South Germans were outraged, and the French found themselves faced with a Hobson's choice: either they could go to war or suffer severe diplomatic embarrassment at home and abroad. The following conflict saw the French being thoroughly curbstomped within eight months as the Prussians outmaneuvered and outgunned them again and again. Massive conscription after the majority of professional soldiers fell into Prussian captivity at Metz and Sedan did little to alleviate the problems. To add insult to injury, the Germans proclaimed their new Empire in Versailles, the old seat of the French kings, driving a wedge between France and Germany that would not be overcome until the 1960s.

The unification of Germany marked a massive shift in the balance of the European powers. The weakest power in the European concert (Prussia) suddenly became the strongest on the continent, with a massive population, a disciplined and modern army that ground every enemy it faced into the dirt like they were nothing, and a huge industrial base that was kicked into overdrive once the multitude of national barriers between the small German dukedoms were abolished (also helped by the reparations France had to pay to the Germans as well as the capture of Alsace-Lothringia and its rich deposits of ore). It grew so fast and rapidly that only in the span of 30 years, it managed to surpass the production levels of steel and coal of every other imperial power in the world and singlehandedly pioneered large-scale industrial chemical production with inventions like the Haber process for synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen (invaluable and irreplaceable in anything that has to do with anorganic chemistry, like most of the fertilizers used in contemporary farming). In general the German Empire was at the forefront of what's called the "Second Industrial Revolution" of the late 19th century.

The Germans, being late to the party as far as imperialism was concerned, wanted a piece of that big fat colonial cake that they felt were owed and used their industrial and military leverage to apply massive pressure to the rest of Europe. This, combined with the inherent semi-feudal social order that had persisted in Prussia since the 1600s and the rampant militarism of German society, created a very aggressive nationalist machismo which ultimately contributed a lot to the crisis that led to World War One with all of its cataclysmic consequences. Nearly all negative stereotypes people associate with Germany to this day, like militarism, brutishness, blind obedience, lack of humour, strict workplace discipline, punctuality, and being unemotional come from this particular era. The culture that this attitude bred eventually led to the mindset that gave rise to the Nazis after Germany's defeat in World War I and only started to fizzle out after the old elites of the German Empire were permanently removed from power after World War II forced the Germans to reinvent themselves and their nation.

== The British Empire ==
{{British}}
{{topquote|On her dominions the sun never sets; before his evening rays leave the spires of Quebec, his morning beams have shone three hours on Port Jackson, and while sinking from the waters of Lake Superior, his eye opens upon the Mouth of the Ganges.|The Caledonian Mercury}}
[[image:British Empire 1921.png|thumb|left|400px|“C" is for colonies
Rightly we boast
that of all the great nations
Great Britain has most!"- Mrs Ernest Ames, An ABC for Baby Patriots]]

Remember the British East India Company from the [[Age of Enlightenment]]? Well, eventually Britain decided to drop the pretense that it was merely an English corporation that was building colonies everywhere and just owned the fact that, yes, they were trying to take over the world. They hadn't been the only ones; the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Germans, Russians, and several American presidents were as well, and near the end Japan would try to get in on the action.

The Napoleonic Wars had left the British in the enviable position of having the world's biggest, baddest navy. This was a title they would hold until the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the massive debts the British had racked up during WWI led them to conceded that they would have to be okay with the US Navy equaling them in size. They would lose it entirely after the Second World War, due to the tremendous debts of fighting that war piled on top of the previous one.

Having a massive navy at its disposal meant that the British could effectively dictate terms to anyone within sight of the sea. This persuasion was not solely political strong-arming, but also took the form of general peacekeeping and anti-slavery operations with the West Africa Squadron alone freeing hundreds of thousands of slaves and largely shutting down the Atlantic Triangle. At its height the British Empire had founded colonies or established protectorates on almost every major landmass on Earth, and had presences at the key maritime choke points of Gibraltar, the Suez, the Cape of Good Hope, Singapore, and the Falklands near Cape Horn. It was said that "The sun never sets on the British Empire," which is still technically true due to the existence of the Pitcairn Islands.

=== The Crimean War ===
The Crimean War is one of those wars that tends to be forgotten about by non-history buffs, but its effects on the world were out of all proportion to its relatively short duration (October 1853-February 1856). This was the war that gave us [[Wikipedia:Florence Nightingale|Florence Nightingale]], [[Wikipedia:Charge of the Light Brigade|the Charge of the Light Brigade]], the [[Wikipedia:Victoria Cross|Victoria Cross]], and the [[Wikipedia:Government reforms of Alexander II of Russia|Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II]]. It was also one of the first conflicts to see widespread use of high-explosive shells, telegraphs, railways, and photography; in some senses it can therefore be considered the first modern war.

The war was ostensibly started over the treatment of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, but in reality it was all about the balance of power in Europe. The Ottoman Empire was in the middle of its long collapse, and Russia was taking the opportunity to flex its muscles in Central Europe. Britain wasn't thrilled by the prospect of Turkey being conquered by Russia, and Napoleon III needed a show of strength abroad to strengthen his position at home. When the Ottomans asked for changes to the agreement on their treatment of Orthodox Christians, Russia threw a fit and declared war. The British, French, and eventually the Italians sided with the Ottomans. At first, the fighting was bloody and inconclusive, with the Russians mauling the Ottomans at the Battle of Sinop and laying siege to Kars but being stopped at Silistra. The British and French promptly sent ships and troops through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea and invaded the Crimea. This is where the Battle of Balaclava and the Siege of Sevastopol took place. Balaclava became famous for the [[Wikipedia:The Thin Red Line (Battle of Balaclava)|"Thin Red Line"]] of the 93rd Highlanders and the [[Wikipedia:Charge of the Light Brigade|Charge of the Light Brigade]]. The Siege was a badly managed, yearlong slog that killed thousands of troops on both sides and wound up killing the British army commander, Lord Raglan, who'd been catching hell in the press since Balaclava and was even more depressed that the Russians were holding out for so long. Ultimately the mounting casualty figures and apparent pointlessness of the whole thing led Britain and France to call for peace negotiations, the outcome of which saw Russia and Turkey handing back the territories they'd captured and Russia losing the right to base ships in the Black Sea. Russia's defeat was seen as a national humiliation and led directly to the Great Reforms of Alexander II. Among other things, he abolished serfdom in the Empire, modernized the military, relaxed press censorship, and reformed the justice and educational systems. Most of these reforms were rolled back by reactionary conservatives after Alexander was assassinated in 1881, which led to increasing unrest in the country's radical underground and may have ultimately contributed to the Russian Revolution in 1917. On the flipside, the British got the lasting cultural legacy of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale. Horrified by the reports of wounded British soldiers being treated in atrocious conditions, Florence rolled up her sleeves, went to the Crimea with some of her friends, and effectively invented the modern nursing profession while also pushing for reforms in sanitation that greatly reduced death rates in the field hospitals and would later be implemented throughout India and Britain.

Also led to the birth of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention.

=== The Indian Mutiny ===
In 1853 the cost of rifling had come down enough that the British could transition from smoothbore firearms supplemented by specialist riflemen, both using the slow and relatively unreliable flintlock system, to standardizing on a rifled, percussion-cap weapon, resulting in the 1853 Enfield. Like many firearms of this era, it was loaded via cartridges consisting of the powder and ball in a sealed paper sleeve. The rifle was loaded by tearing open the cartridge (often by biting it), pouring in the powder, and ramming in the ball. This significant arms upgrade eventually reached India. In 1857 rumors (which were never proven) developed that the cartridges were coated with animal fats including beef tallow and pork lard, pissing off the Hindu and Muslim natives. This proved to the final straw for a long-brewing rebellion. Shortly into the Mutiny, the mutineers at Cawnpore slaughtered women and children who had surrendered. This proved to be a PR disaster for the rebels, killing any claim they had to legitimacy or the moral high ground and enraging the British public enough to warrant a very strong response. One important note is that the mutiny was not total (in fact, the conflict was mostly contained to Bengal), and many colonial troops fought against the mutineers, particularly Sikhs who had no prohibitions on pork or beef and were keen on the idea of getting to kill Hindus and Muslims. The conflict would lead to the effective end of the British East India Company in favor of direct rule (the "British Raj"), which was generally a serious improvement in conditions for Indians if you continued to ignore the lack of influence they had over how they would be ruled.

While relatively short (a year and a half), there was little lull in the action and there are a lot of firsthand accounts one can look through to get an understanding of combat in the era. Of particular note is the several accounts of rebels being shot multiple times with a revolver but living long enough to kill or seriously injure men with their swords, which remain important in any consideration of knife vs. gun. One officer even managed to kill ~10 rebels with a ''spear'' by funneling them through a narrow doorway.

As a side note, the rifle at the center of this would eventually be exported to the Confederate States of America (see above) in large numbers, which after its defeat would then be sold surplus to the post-Sakoku Japanese government (see above again).

=== The Boer Wars ===
During the Napoleonic Wars the British gained control of every Dutch colony, and while they handed most of them back afterwards, they decided the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa was too good to let go, so they bought it. [[Rape|The Dutch weren't in a position to refuse the offer]]. A long series of disputes arising from this eventually escalated into a war between the Dutch-descended Boers and the British colonials (the Africans in the region were smart enough to know that they were kinda screwed no matter who won). Both wars were disasters for the British (even though they eventually won the second through overwhelming force) thanks to using Napoleonic tactics in an era of rifled repeating firearms. This was even worse in the first war since the British had not yet ditched their iconic red uniforms. Even after they got wise and switched to khaki, things didn't improve in the early stages of the Second Boer War as Redvers Buller, in charge on behalf of Garnet Wolseley, proved an unmitigated failure, losing battle after battle. After Buller got fired and replaced by Wolseley's rival Frederick Roberts (which caused the British army to basically split in two thanks to tensions between Wolseley's African colonial veterans and Roberts and his Indian troops), the Brits won on the field and the Boers resorted to an insurgency which was brutally suppressed (by which we mean the term "concentration camp" was literally invented here). Adding insult to injury, Roberts replaced Wolseley as Commander-in-Chief after the war.

The Boer Wars have been largely forgotten except by military historians due to their [[The World Wars|foreshadowing of things to come]]. One thing that has survived into the present day is the term "commando", which originally referred to the organization of the Boer forces during the wars and acquired its modern usage due to their unorthodox (for the time) tactics this organization enabled.

==Notes==
*This was the era where Europeans, and the nations descended from them, truly and unquestionably ruled the world. Their head-start in industrialization, advanced military and civilian technology, the vast accumulated wealth from previous centuries, and advanced medicine and agriculture gave them an advantage that any other culture at the time was incapable of overcoming. With that came a lot of nastiness. You see, the notion that people not born with a silver spoon up their arses were worth more than their value as meatshields or manual laborers hadn't caught on yet, and this went double for foreigners. The ruthlessness and blatant disregard for human life with which the imperial powers of the time exploited the people they ruled over caused widespread resentment and led to a long series of uprisings, some more successful than others. Later down the line this exploitation triggered the decolonization movement and the brutal struggle of the underclasses for equal rights and humane treatment (which continue to this day).
*The agricultural revolution, where machines and other modern technology were applied to farming, accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the former fed the latter by allowing enough food to be produced that the majority of workers could take factory jobs instead of agricultural work. Additionally, the invention of the Haber-Bosch-process made the large-scale production of anorganic fertilizer from atmopheric nitrogen possible, turning landscapes that were previously thought of as unsuitable for any kind of farming into lush gardens. This earned Fritz Haber, its inventor, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1919 (at the time a very controversial decision, as Haber also provided his expertise to the German war effort and among other things invented ammonium nitrate as a substitute for TNT and the first chemical weapons to be used in WWI.)
* Several technologies supported the process of industrialization. Steam power helped kick things off by revolutionizing manufacturing and transportation, but two others were also important. Large machinery and tall buildings required steel to become cheap enough that it could be made on a massive scale. Historically, making good-quality steel was a time-consuming process that needed the careful attention of expert craftsmen. This changed with the invention of the Bessemer process, wherein bellows would be used to blast hot air directly into the molten iron to get it hot enough to smelt out impurities. Electricity also helped tremendously, allowing for much longer working cycles through lightbulbs and improved communications through telegraph and radio.
*The invention of vapor-compression cycle cooling was also a major innovation of this era, although until electricity became widely available its use was mostly constrained to steam-powered dairies in cities. This allowed for much denser and heavily mechanized industrial centers, as well greater population in warmer areas. The flush toilet and toilet paper also originated at this time.
*Vulcanized rubber arose during this era. While important for sealing and tires, one major change this facilitated was in clothing. The elastic waistband brought about modern undergarments among other things. The first plastics were invented in the 1860s, but these early plastics were brittle and had few practical uses, so the true rise of plastics would not be till the era of [[The World Wars]] and [[The Cold War|and beyond]].
*Food preservation made large advances. For most of human history, food preservation had been limited to drying (through methods including salt, smoke and/or sugar), pickling and (in climates that allowed it) freezing, all of which originated in the [[Bronze Age]] at the latest. Now methods like jarring and canning food emerged (though early sealing methods turned out to be toxic themselves), along with serious improvements to old methods like like quick freezing, the electric icemaker/freezer/refrigerator (domestic versions won't appear till the interwar period though), freeze-drying, and spray-drying, led to food that took up much less space while having lifespans measured in ''years''. These methods continue to be refined in [[Post-Cold War|the current era]], largely through new materials and understanding of microscopic organisms.
**To add to that, the invention of beef extract by the German chemist Justus von Liebig revolutionized the way food could be produced at larger scales at lower cost. It served as the catalyst for the invention of most modern processed foods and the birth of large scale food factories, where cheap food could be produced to feed an ever increasing amount of mouths, further accelerating the population boom that coincided with the improvement of healthcare as outlined below.
*The invention of modern medicine, which arguably started with the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis' research into childbed fever (a dangerous infection of the uterus through bacteria that enter the body after giving birth), delivered the modern template of how medical research is conducted (i.e. You make an observation, formulate an hypothesis based on that observation and employ a study with standardized sets of probands to prove or disprove your hypothesis). Combined with the with the first proof of how bacteria cause sickness through the German doctor Robert Koch and the subsequent triumph of medical hygiene, this newfound understanding of illnesses and plagues that had decimated entire civilizations in the millennia before led to a huge increase in birth rates and life expectancy for every human on the planet. As a result, the world population increased rapidly, starting in the 1850s, a trend that peaked in the 1960s and is continuously decreasing ever since (not that bad of a thing as one might think, with climate change, limited resources and all)
*The Scramble for Africa begins in 1881 and ends in 1914. Almost all modern "explorer" cliches and imagery began here; think Theodore Roosevelt's misadventures, Dr. Stanley Livingston of "I presume?" fame, or the Indiana Jones movies. The two main exceptions, the American frontiersman in his coonskin cap and breastplate-clad Spanish conquistador, are both strongly linked to a specific type and time instead of explorers in general. The stereotype of the great white hunter/explorer wearing a pith helmet, binoculars, and khaki overalls while hacking his way through the jungle with a big-ass knife in one hand and an elephant gun in the other started here.
*Human flight was first achieved in this era. In 1783 the first air balloon flight took place, and was first put to military use in 1794. The Wright Flyer took flight in late 1903, marking the first heavier than air flying machine. Zeppelins became practical just before World War I.
* Naval technology went through multiple revolutions. The wooden sailing ships of the Napoleonic Wars gave way to ironclad tallships with steam and sail propulsion, only to be replaced in turn by warships built entirely from steel. The famous duel of the ''Merrimack'' and the ''Monitor'' marked the end of wooden warships, the appearance of the steam launch ''Turbinia'' led to a transition to turbine engines, and HMS ''Dreadnought'' heralded the modern battleship. The first military submarines appeared in the American Revolution and Civil War, although the concept wouldn't be perfected until the Great War.
* The beginnings of feminism started in the 19th century, as women began to lobby for more access to their countries' social, political, and economic spheres. They scored some notable successes. In 1861, property-owning women in Victoria Australia could vote in local elections. In 1890 women gained the full franchise (but could not run for office) in New Zealand, while in 1893 full female suffrage was permitted in Colorado and 1902 saw federal suffrage in the new Commonwealth of Australia. By the late 19th century, the academic profession was opened up to women. It was still pretty damn sexist, but things were in motion.
* The Victorians (or at least those who could afford to do so) went in for elaborate periods of mourning. Not just a wake, funeral, and a catered lunch in formal wear while a funeral home gouges the family, or even sitting shiva for a week. A widow mourning her dear departed hubby was expected to wear black clothing and a veil, put up black ornamentation and wear black jewelry, and act reserved and solemn and so forth for a year. A lot of what we associate with death, mourning and similar subjects has its origins here and the Goths got a lot from it.
* Holiday travel and mass tourism also became a thing here. Though medieval peasants had gotten lots of days off for religious reasons, they typically didn't have much to do or anywhere to go on those days off, being as they were medieval peasants. Rich people, of course, had always been able to travel pretty much anywhere they liked, which had led to the rise of the "Grand Tour", wherein young men (and occasionally women) of means would dick around Europe for a few months or years while receiving a classical education, taking in the local culture, and getting laid. The proliferation of railways, steamships, and middle-class jobs made travel a practicable concept for the masses for the first time, so that by the 1870s an average middle-class family could go to the country or the seaside for a vacation or even travel abroad on a package tour. The Grand Tour persisted for a while after this, thanks to ''nouveau riche'' Americans taking up the practice, but ultimately it fell out of favor as enthusiasm for classical culture declined.

==The appeal of the Industrial Revolution==
This era produced many things modern people take for granted and have difficulty considering life without. The rise of film and audio recording during this era and mass printing of advertisement and newspapers during this era mean there is no shortage of records of daily life, so this era is fairly well understood. Of particular note is that the late 1800s printed mail order catalogs started being printed, and these now provide quality information on everyday items, complete with cost and illustrations, that simply don't exist in earlier eras. Those researching earlier eras for this kind of thing have to go through the rare surviving records of estate sales, government orders and business transactions to get a ''fraction'' the understanding a layman can obtain from viewing a simple public domain catalog. These have proven such good resources some historically set RPGs outright say to find catalogs from companies like Bannerman (A surplus arms dealer so successful he built a castle on a private island next to West Point as an advertisement, since everyone traveling the Hudson had to see the sign on it), Montgomery Ward, and Sears Roebuck to fill in the blanks of the equipment list. Before this period, historians were mostly concerned with Big Things: wars, generals, kings, nobles, priests and the occasional artist, merchant, architect, engineer or inventor thrown in, often because there was so few records of the common man. In the Industrial Revolution historians became able and willing to adequately research the way people lived their lives day to day, from well-to-do merchants and skilled tradesmen to factory workers to scavengers picking through garbage for bones, rages, scraps of metal and dog turds to sell.

The Industrial Revolution allowed for inventors to not only create meaningful new creations, but see them become common overnight. [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Before the Industrial Revolution changes generally happened slowly with various small tweaks on things and methods, the compilation of said tweaks rolling over and the occasional breakthrough like the water wheel or gunpowder every once and a while which would take centuries to come into it's own]]. A peasant would assume that his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren would till the soil just as he did with what changes that did happen in his lifetime being largely minor stuff that tweaked the board but did not change the game. Industrialization changed all that, lives were changed for better or worse by mechanization suddenly and totally. Progress became an idea that would drive the world, even if problems were also mounting. People came to understand that the past was not just the present which happened beforehand and the future could be more than just more of the same. It's not surprising that science fiction started up in the 19th century, as did horror: Jules Verne, HG Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe were all active writers of the era.

This time was also one of upheaval socially and politically. Before the Industrial Revolution people generally operated on the idea that one should "Know One's Station", that society was divided into classes that were (with various degrees of legal formality enforcing this) hereditary, static and instead of trying to get out of them they should stay in them, stay out of the affairs of people of other classes and obey their betters. If you were a peasant you'd work for your lord, obey his orders, treat him with reverence as a higher form of human, be jolly grateful to have such a man as your master and avoid thinking about all that politics stuff which is none of your business. While this had not died out in the Industrial Revolution (see all of England's class stuff), it was on the decline both from gradual erosion and active resistance.

The source of wealth shifted from farms and fields to factories and companies which the merchant classes/bourgeois now owned. To be a noble you needed a peerage at least (in England that is, the rest of Europe, especially Spain and Germany remained static feudal societies at heart, while the French and eventually the Russians abolished it in a literally cutthroat fashion) and preferably a dozen generations of pedigree which your fellow nobs would respect even if you were broke, to be a captain of industry you just needed a lot of money invested in the right companies. It was possible for a poor man to rise to the highest echelons of society in the Industrial Revolution, see Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The downside of it was that these rich buggers tended to view the poor which could not rise from rags (ignoring of course how most of these ''nouveau riche'' then made it as difficult as possible for anyone to actually join their ranks) as being lazy incompetents that were only fit for ruthless exploitation and that attempting to help them out (beyond providing them with just enough education for them to do whatever work the rich needed them to do and healthy enough to keep working) was not only useless, but an active evil in the long term since it meant only more of them in the long run. To quote Charles Dickens' ''A Christmas Carol'':

''"Many cannot go there [Workhouses and Prisons] and many would rather die."''

''“If they'd rather die, they'd better do it and decrease the surplus population."''

The Industrial Revolution people had oppressive rigid order and stability swapped out for opportunities to excel and thrive or crash and burn. You could be born dirt poor and rise to riches, or you might start out as a skilled tradesmen who ends up as just another disposable factory worker.

That attitude about the poor went doubly so for the colonial subjects and non-white people in general. In 1876 there was a drought which led to crop failure in much of India, instead of importing food to feed the affected masses (which they'd done not long before successfully) the Raj Government allowed merchants to stockpile grain and sell it abroad to drive the price up. The result was famine and starvation which killed 6-10 million people. [[Grimdark|The Belgians in the Congo Free State made this look saintly by comparison.]]

Such treatment of the working class, combined with the belief that since the working class were the actual producers of wealth they should be the ones with the right to decide how the machines and materials used to make said wealth were used, would lead to Karl Marx writing the ''Communist Manifesto'':, creating [[communism]], one of the most notable ideologies of the 20th century and also one of the most [[skub|controversial]].

Ideologies aside you can boil down the Industrial Revolution social movements to the average human thinking: "Hey, we can actually make tons and tons of wondrous gadgets to make life better, but why is that I can't get some of the gadgets too so I can have a better life?". While this meme emerged first in West Europe and North America it inevitably expanded to the colonies and independent nations until it eventually covered the entire planet.

The Industrial Revolution is the start of the Modern World and many of its issues still persist to this day. People can relate to an Industrial Revolution era person more easily than that of a peasant in the Middle Ages, a serf in the Dark Ages, a citizen soldier of the Classical Era, a scribe at a pharaoh's court, a priest king in the Fertile Crescent or Grug and his rocks. The downside of this is that these issues are still politically charged to this day.

===Fantasy Relevance===
As a tangent from the historical to the literary, the Industrial Revolution is something which often looms in the background of Fantasy at a meta level with various degrees of overtness. The implication is that sooner or latter as the elves in splendid cities and ancient forests weave their spells and loose their arrows, the dwarves delve and hold the line to defend their mountain homes, the orcs sound the drums of war and sharpen their blades for battle, dragons soar, necromancers scheme, kings reign, adventurers set out on epic quests and all that fantastic wonder, somewhere someone notices a pot on the boil rattling its lid and imagines how the force of pressurized steam could be used, setting in motion the end of that era. Yes, that's a gross oversimplification of a centuries long processes with many intermediate steps that culminated with Locomotives and the Crystal Palace. The point still stands that in a world where people like us exist, eventually observant souls, those inclined to tinker, those looking to make work easier and increase productivity and those who can see the work of such inventive souls as the keys to wealth and power will figure these things out and move a society beyond the 15th century with those which refuse to move with the times getting rolled over.

In Tolkien's work this fact is dealt with mostly in subtext of disdain (the industrialists of Middle Earth were villains and the results of their labors were ruin and destruction) and a sense of melancholy as past ages end. In other fantasy settings such as [[Forgotten Realms]] there are forces working to stop this, ranging from organizations like the harpers to the Gods enforcing [[Medieval Stasis]]. Some settings, like [[Discworld]] and to a smaller degree [[Warhammer Fantasy]], accept that this will happen and have the transition woven into their worldbuilding. In fact you can see Pratchett's later works as an answer to Tolkien's criticism towards modernity, while oversimplified in some aspects the Moist von Lipwig Trilogy makes some good explanations towards how industrialization emerged and how it works as well as its potential flaws and shortcomings without going full ludite.

==Industrial Revolution inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* [[Steampunk]]
* Much of Discworld
* Thief series which are set in a weird blend of medieval fantasy and early industrial revolution.
* [[Eberron]] before the Last War. After it Eberron is a cross between Industrial Revolution and interwar.
* [[Arcanum]] is a magical world that is currently undergoing a revolution.
* [[Iron Kingdoms]]'s whole schtick is that it's a typical fantasy setting that developed into this.
* The [[Skaven]], particularly their Weapons Teams and anything related to [[Clan Skryre]]. Thankfully one of the reasons why they never achieved world domination in one fell swoop is the overall lack of quality control on their gadgets.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

StarCraft

2023-05-16T02:56:25Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Terran Units */

{{/vg/}}
[[File:StarCraft 1998-2013.jpg|400px|thumb|right|The 90's were a good time. From left to right: Terrans, Zerg and Protoss.]]
'''StarCraft''' is Real Time Strategy [[video game]], made by [[Blizzard]]. Despite being THE most balanced asymmetrical RTS ever and the South Korean national religion, StarCraft is most famous in [[neckbeard]] society for the "It's all stolen from [[Warhammer 40000|WH40K]]" holy war.

Long story short, there are rumors, denied by both Blizzard and [[GW]], that StarCraft was initially developed as a WH40K game, until GW for some [[Derp|retarded]] reason rescinded their permission to use the 40K universe (<s>like they don't want a part of the bazillion tons of money Blizzard tend to earn for their games</s>back then PC gaming was something only a handful of nerds did, compared to consoles, and Blizzard wasn't an established powerhouse, yet; 1998 was the year PC gaming started booming with HL, SC, etc.). [[/v/]] tends to accuse GW of stealing Blizzard's ideas, which sounds silly at first, until you see the current Tyranid design. Prior to SC, the nids looked very different, as in, they looked even sillier than the Space Marines do now.... until you then realize that the Zerg also looked really different pre-Starcraft 2, looking more bizzare and alien like the original Tyranid designs, whereas Starcraft 2 made the new Zerg very Nid-like (As the new Tyranid aesthetic had been established before Starcraft 2 was even announced officially) and , with things like segmented carapaces and draconic features in the new bugs, whereas the old Zerg were generally even more insectoid than the Tyranids of the time (Who were more giger-esque, rather then the weird dragon-dino-bugs we have now). And you wouldnt want to be a [[/b/|/b/tard]] who confuses the difference between the massive art and design shift from 2nd to 3rd edition that is clearly accidental in being after the release of Starcraft with graphical (and tabletop model detail) as neither species of alien locusts got any real design (non-crunch) differences since then, unless growing 4 more spikes is as big of a change as going from [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gA0hnkRNbss/Tzu86RwIMWI/AAAAAAAABdE/IEgaPO5GkQw/s400/warrior_Metal_2nd.jpeg this] to [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VV_PyFTrfRw/Tzu88DgylrI/AAAAAAAABdo/xoUWM6vz7SU/s1600/Hive_Tyrant.gif this].

To be fair, there is a lot in common between the Starcraft and 40k universes; but if you remove your fanboy glasses it's obviously because [[Starship Troopers|both settings are shameless rip-offs of]] the entire sci-fi genre with less then 0.1% original content - it's not like there weren't human space marines, ravenous, rapidly adaptable bug monsters, and psychic alien warriors before 40K. Deep inside your heart you know it to be true.

Besides, anyone who takes the time to play both games will immediately notice that the actual rules and gameplay are radically different, even when ignoring the fact that one is a video game and one is a tabletop game. StarCraft is very much based around the collecting and spending of resources, shifting army compositions, microing individual units, scouting, etc. 40k on the other hand has you pick out your army before a game even starts, uses randomized elements (dice), and most of the decision making is in how you position your units and engage the enemy. Yes, there is overlap, but a lot of that is simply because they're both strategy games. There is also a huge emphasis on scouting and counter-scouting in StarCraft, where gathering and denying information and outright deceiving your opponent makes or breaks matches, while in 40K like only two armies even have the ability to hide anything (and it's only a minor details, like whether your Deathwing deep strikes turn one or two), and denying your opponent any information is against the rules. Regardless of whether Blizzard ripped off GW, or GW ripped off Blizzard, or both, the actual gameplay experiences are quite distinct.

TL;DR: If you're a fan of 40k or SC, stop bitching about all that "stolen" shit. Doing it marks you as a fool, and by doing it you make all your fellow fans look retarded. 40k is a blatant Mega crossover fanfic, 90% ripped off from 2000AD, [[Dune]], [[Isaac Asimov|Foundation]], [[Doom]], Alien, [[Starship Troopers]], [[Star Wars]], [[1984]], Event Horizon, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos Hyperion] ([[Hyperion|not this one]]), [[H.P. Lovecraft]], [[Anime]] about [[Mecha]] and so on, all pasted straight onto [[Warhammer Fantasy]] anyway. Recent studies show that people are unconsciously "inspired" by things far more than we know and that it's possible to plant and predict "original" ideas from people down to pretty detailed levels, all the while they think they just came up with a new idea. So next time you want to complain, try to remember the last time YOU had a truly original good idea, and not one heavily influenced by the media you enjoy.

==The Story in Brief==
Starcraft takes place in the Koprulu sector (named after a prominant dynasty in the Ottoman Empire, go figure), a distant part of the galaxy where abandoned human colonies <s>are disrupted from their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy</s> find new ways to continue with their usual routine of civil war and internecine piracy by the sudden attack of a race of alien lizard-bugs that take over and mutate planets to suit their needs, determined to infest the galaxy. Things only get worse when a bunch of stuffy psychic aliens show up, determined to destroy the aforementioned lizard-bugs - and not caring much if they kill humans in the process. Havoc ensues.

==The Races==
===[[Humanity Fuck Yeah|The Terrans]]===
====Terran Gameplay====
[[File: Best Space Marine Art Ever Made.jpeg|thumb|right|400px|Freehand paint this on a mini.]]
Terrans are the "jack of all trades" of the three factions. They use a combination of specialized power armor suits, tanks, fliers and mecha in battle, and are the only faction whose vanilla trooper is a ranged fighter rather than a melee fighter. Terrans are the absolute champions in turtling up and defending, and tend to have great counter-attack and [[Steel Rain|drop tools]], but on the other hand their defense is reliant almost entirely on units, which means they must leave parts of their armies at home if there is harass threat, while other factions can just spam defensive buildings. Their core buildings can actually take off and fly to new terrain to move the entire base, though they are slow as molasses. Their unique racial tactic is to launch base-annihilating mini-nuke missiles with the aid of a Ghost or Specter, [[Vindicare|a telepathic invisible sniper rifle-wielding super-commando]].

The main problem of the Terrans in competitive play is that their late game suffers from "win more" syndrome. Nukes and battlecruisers are such resource intensive overkill that they simply will not reverse a disadvantage. The Terrans have their biggest advantage with the unlocking of firebats and siege tanks, or when they first gain shuttles.

====Terran Lore====
Right around our current present in the Starcraft universe things went cyberpunk before hard veering into being [[Starship Troopers]]. The United Power League, later called the United Earth Directorate, is the latter and they began to genocide all other genres of humanity resulting very quickly in 400,000,000 deaths until suddenly deciding to gather them up the remaining 40,000 that were physically fit and sealing them into four massive ships along with cryogenically frozen sperm, egg cells, and cloning technology on top of it and sending them all into the Koprulu System to colonize it.

In reality it was more of a social and evolutionary (since many mutants and the first psychics were in the population) experiment than actual planned colonization. The result is most Terrans being somewhere between well-dressed lunatics, dirty space pirates, and rednecks in power armor (Starcraft 1 was almost entirely made up of the latter two, the third mostly disappeared or cleaned up a great deal by Starcraft 2...possibly because they already died in droves in 1's cutscenes).

Two ships crashed on the jungle planet Umoja, the occupants of one all dying leaving the other with a surplus of resources. They formed the “wealthy, democratic, heroic” factions (which you never get to play as). One ship crashed into the “desolate but rich” planet Moria forming the “industrious corporate” factions. One crashed on Tarsonis, becoming the “evil and roguishly heroic” factions (which you almost entirely play as). Specifically Tarsonis became the Confederacy, which was aggressive and resembled an Alabama version of the UPL. They skirmished back and forth with the other factions and put down insurrections constantly until encountering the Zerg and Protoss at around the same time.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a planetary magistrate assigned to the remote world of Mar Sara. There, with the help of local Marshall James "Jim" Raynor, you encounter the first attack of the Zerg, and witness nearby planet Chau Sara being [[Exterminatus]]ed by the Protoss fleet for being infested with Zergs; in your flight to escape the planet before the Zerg devour all humans, you are abandoned by the ruling Terran government, the Confederacy. This leads to you allying with the rebel group known as the Sons of Korhal, and turning on the Confederacy... only for the Sons' leader, Arcturus Mengsk, to backstab you by using the Zerg as a living weapon to overthrow the Confederacy, proclaim himself Emperor Mengsk of "The Terran Dominion", and abandons one of his own agents, Sarah Kerrigan, to the Zerg. Raynor, who was kinda sweet on Kerrigan, turns on Mengsk and runs off. By the Protoss campaign you learn that Raynor and his band of pirates have become the buddies of a diverse group of Protoss united to stop the Zerg regardless of the rest of their race’s bullshit politics, and he stays behind on a suicide mission to give the Protoss a chance to escape their dying homeworld.

In the expansion, Brood War, you play as a ranking captain in the United Earth Directorate fleet, subordinated to Admiral Gerard DuGalle, sent to investigate what became of the lost colonists and bring them back under Directorate control and pacify the Zerg and the Protoss. The mission was partially successful until the Terran colonists, Protoss and Zerg formed a desperate alliance and defeated the UED. You and the rest of the UED expedition force are ultimately wiped out to the last man by Kerrigan(more on ''her'' later) in the final episode of Brood War. In the Zerg campaign you find Raynor is alive and well, and bring his pirates into the aforementioned alliance before it breaks apart.

Novels and comics fill in the gap. The Dominion gets as evil as it can be, Raynor turns to heavy drinking, and a lot of small stories that don’t tie into anything bigger after the story ends occur other than multiple ones creating and expanding on the character Nova who becomes the secondary main Terran character after Raynor.

In the Terran-focused sequel, Wings of Liberty, you play as James "Jim" Raynor, leader of Raynor's Raiders. They're a rebellion group that seeks to bring down the Dominion and destroy the Queen of Blades (or well...sort of. Despite Jim swearing he'll kill Kerrigan in Brood War after betraying and killing his Protoss buddy Fenix, he now downgraded to saving her instead. This is mainly due to the lack of any other alive Zerg characters in the setting). Raynor builds up the strength of his pirate militia into an actual faction again, agrees to listen to his Protoss buddy Zeratul regarding some prophesies, then greatly reduces Mengsk’s political power and destroys his alliances by revealing information on how exactly Mengsk took power (The offical dominion version has it that Mengsk defeated the Zerg on the Confederate home World, in truth he lured them there with a psionic device and nuked the planet to make himself look like a hero, also using the opportunity to tie up loose ends by betraying Kerrigan and Raynor, leaving them to die, which, as outlined here, royally backfired as SC2 went on). He ends the campaign by helping Mengsk’s son attack the heart of Kerrigan’s Swarm and de-Zerg her like Zeratul told him to do.
Because Blizzard loves introducing [[Cheese]], the player gets access to lots of campaign exclusive stuff like stronger versions of each unit and campaign exclusive upgrades a ton of units. They featured a few too many units in the campaign with some being useful only for missions they were introduced, something fixed in later campaigns.

Terrans feature heavily in the Zerg and Protoss campaigns of SC2 as well. Kerrigan Zergs herself up again, but without any ancient gods mucking around in her brain (see the Zerg entry) after she thinks Raynor is dead. She starts fighting the universe again, coincidentally mostly through insane factions of cultists from both Protoss and Terrans, this time just to regain her strength then finds out Raynor is alive and rescues him. He swears to kill her again, then a few missions later he joins her in killing Mengsk. Mengsk’s son takes over and turns the Dominion into a more morally grey faction. The Terrans later all join up with the Protoss to kill the ancient god shit (see Protoss entry).
In the Co-Op Starcraft 2 content which take place during the Protoss campaign it was stated that the events are non-canon (since you can play as characters like Mengsk and Tychus who would be dead and characters like Alarik who are still enemies at that point) but the general events are supported by content that actually is canon. More lore is revealed in the paragraph-long text blurbs for cosmetic items as well as some short stories and comics. The general gist is setting up Starcraft 3 plots like Raynor’s chief scientist starting a Terran/Protoss cult worshiping a sapient planet, intelligent Zerg seeding Terran worlds and seemingly starting to slowly make intelligent hybrids, and Mengsk’s son setting up a more united humanity since the United Earth Directorate is still big enough to wipe out the sector and will eventually return. There is also a Protoss/Terran shared colony, a faction of renegade robots with humanlike AI, a faction of robot Zerg, and new factions rising in newly colonized worlds. Raynor is missing and his pirates have merged into other factions especially Mengsk’s son’s Dominion, so Nova is the main character now.

Most of the Terran aesthetic comes from Chris Metzen, far more than most Blizzard properties. As a teenager he apparently wrote stories and made art about some story about a cowboy marshal during the second American civil war, this time in space. Most of the ideas were recycled into Starcraft, with the exception of the main character who was split between Jim Raynor and much later the character Soldier 76 (the original character name) from [[Overwatch]]. So if you wonder why there is a Confederacy that is full of toothless hillbillies in space wearing grey fighting the blue guys, that's why.

The Terrans also feature the most hilariously underpowered variant of the [[Space Marine|Power-armoured soldier in space]]-archetype in all of Sci-Fi, where for some reason guys (and gals) in powered armour the weight of a truck are even less effective than a Guardsman of the [[Imperial Guard]] and this is decidedly not the result of the opposition being as batshit overpowered as in 40k, it's just fun [[Grimdark]] that the average infantryman's giant armour is about as useful for protection as a soldier's uniform during the age of flintlocks (while the guns firing on them are ''much'' better) and having medics around them which can magically heal injuries in moments makes them live over nine seconds in combat. There can a point be made that in-universe, the Marines are more or less conscripted militia that receive basic, if any, training and are acting more like a hyper-militarized police force and the suits themselves not really designed with combat in mind (they're outright stated to have the main purpose of providing environmental protection) since that's what the ships, mechas and other gizmos are for.

====Terran Units====
'''SCV:''' A utility exosuit used to mine minerals, transport refined vespene gas, construct buildings and repair damaged structures and machinery. This unique ability to heal mechanized troops makes them incredibly useful.

'''MULE:''' A mining drone introduced in SC2 as a summon from an Orbital Command. It can mine faster than a SCV but has a timed life, and mastering its deployment greatly helps your economy.

'''Marine:''' A generic grunt in powered armor armed with a gauss rifle that launches hyper-velocity spikes at people. Can take combat drugs that let it boost firing and movement speed in exchange for health, and in StarCraft II can take a shield that boosts survivability (which originally also would have included a purely-visual bayonet [[Derp|that fans complained about for some reason despite how the average Marine dies from drowning in Zergling swarms]] and got cut). Is notable for being the only starting troop that is a ranged attacker and can shoot air units.

'''Firebat:''' Arsonists and pyromaniacs strapped into specialized powered armor outfitted with flamethrowers. They specialize in burning through hordes of lightly armored organic units such as Zerg infantry, and like Marines, they can also do combat drugs to speed up the burninating. Their suits were bulked up in the sequel, making them much more durable but taking up more slots in the bunker and losing their stimpack ability. Their lore states that the gases used in their flamethrowers leak into the suit and drive the trooper nuts, so if they weren't pyromaniacs beforehand, they will be after a tour of duty. They were replaced by the Hellion and subsequently its Hellbat transformation but are still available in SC2's campaign.

'''Medic:''' Power-armored nurses who can heal organic troops... and that's it. They buff the survivability of other troopers, but can't fight themselves. They had a few support abilities in Brood War like their optical flare that reduces their target's vision to the minimum while disabling detection capability, and the ability to purge any negative effects from friendly units.

'''Ghost:''' Brainwashed psychics who can telepathically cloak themselves for invisibility and use telekinesis to give themselves the super-strength needed to wield hyper-powered sniper rifles. Used as assassins and covert troops. Their special gimmick is the ability to target nuclear bombardments. They died too easily in the original and had upgrades that were too expensive to be worth using. The sequel gave them better abilities, while only requiring their invisibility to be researched, put them much lower on the tech tree while making the more durable so they were much more useful. The lore behind Ghosts might be some of the most [[Grimdark]] parts of Starcrafts as a whole; they are usually taken as children under the guise of a patronage for psionically gifted kinds scheme, but psionic children being abducted by mercenaries or government agents (also usually Ghosts, going full circle) is also anything but unheard of. The children are then subjected to training and routine memory wipes to keep them docile and compliant, as well as neuroleptics and anti-psionic goodies. And the tragic thing? Especially with the last part, you're actually doing them a ''favor''. Psionics in Starcraft, especially the stronger ones, are very often unable to control their powers and suppressing them is often the only way they can even function as people. Kerrigan and Nova had both the problem that they could not sleep because other peoples thoughts kept crept creeping into their heads. Add to that that the Government essentially employs you as its own personal hitman (or -woman) and will keep erasing your identity, or what semblence of it remains after training, if you talk back, step out of line but sometimes also simply for shits and giggles. Being a Ghost is not fun in Starcraft.
*'''Spectre:''' A subtype of the Ghosts, they were an attempt by the Dominion to create Ghosts from psionically inert humans and enhance the abilities of existing Ghosts. It was a mixed success. Spectres are generally better in combat, but also susceptible to psychotic breakdowns and difficult to make. Their exposure to an alien hallucinogen also brought them into Amons fold during the events of Legacy of the Void. They are campaign-exclusive to the Wings of Liberty campaign, where you can choose between them and Ghosts in one mission; both units are very, very niche in regards to their usefulness. Ghosts are better against light units and spellcasters, while Spectres deal more damage against armour and with an AoE Stun as their special ability; Terran Research can also give them a whopping 200 single-target damage spell, which is very useful during the final missions of the camapign where the game will throw a lot of high HP units against your base.

'''Marauder:''' An SC2 retrofit of the Firebat that swaps the flamethrower for twin grenade launchers; they specialize in smashing structures and armored foes, but are kind of crappy against lightly armored grunts, in a reverse to the Firebats. Shockingly, they are the most sane and socially well-adjusted of Terran infantry in spite of their enthusiasm in blowing shit up, possibly because Terran forces decided arming madmen with weapons that would be effective against their infrastructure instead of just the numerous cannon fodder they don't care about was a final logical straw to them.

'''Reaper:''' Murderers and scumbags strapped into jet-propelled power armor, armed with dual pistols and explosives, and deployed as suicide-trooper scouts and fast attack squads. They are most often used to harass worker lines and damage your foe's economy, jumping up and down cliffs or rushing past defenders to get at the lightly armored workers.

'''Spectre:''' A Ghost upgraded with a psy-enhancing chemical, burning out the brainwashing mojo and giving them enhanced psionic attacks. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as an alternative to Ghosts.

'''Vulture:''' Grenade launcher-toting hoverbikes used as scouts and hit-and-run troopers. Can be upgraded to deploy spider mines which, instead of waiting for someone to step on them, suicide charge into nearby enemies. While replaced by the Hellion, it is usable in SC2's campaign where you can upgrade it to replenish its mines for a small mineral cost.

'''Siege Tank:''' Big badass tank that can also shapeshift into an immobile but more powerful mortar unit. The cannon in their mobile mode packs a decent punch and they're resistant to (but not immune) small arms but they are mostly used immobilizing themselves to fire their big gun, which has the highest damage of non suicide and non ability attack outside of campaigns [[Derp|and all in all means they aren't really used like tanks]]. It also has range that actually extends beyond the tank's line of sight so you need a spotter to take full advantage of it.

'''Goliath:''' [[Sentinel]]-like combat walkers outfitted for anti-ground and anti-air capabilities, later replaced by the Viking and Thor but available to be used in SC2's campaign. In the base SC game it suffered from trying to be good too many things and ended being good at nothing, starting in the Brood War expansion it was made into a dedicated anti-air unit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90K_G4hyxCk| It also had legendarily shitty pathing.] When you get access to it in SC2's Terran campaign the campaign exclusive upgrades make it damn good at its job.

'''Hellion:''' SC2 replacement of the Vulture; a hyper-speedy land rover outfitted with a powerful flamethrower. Later became a transforming mech able to shapeshift into the humanoid exosuit mode "Hellbat" which functions similarly to the Firebat.

'''Thor:''' A humongous heavy artillery walker specialized in anti-air missile barrages. Initially had the ability to immobilize itself to briefly fire cannons that would destroy almost any ground unit, but expansions replaced that with the ability to switch between anti-air missiles for groups of weaker air units and big guns for single big air units. Is also infamous for its numerous [[Alpha Legion|canon conflicts with regard to its origin]], where you face one in a secret enemy lab [[Wat|despite it only being developed the previous day in the previous mission by your own chief engineer]].

'''Diamondback:''' Hovertank armed with twin railguns that rape enemy armor and is one of the few units that can fire on the move. Exclusive to SC2's campaign. While it sounds useful on paper, it's mostly good for the mission you find it in where your goal is to kill fast moving targets with heavy armor, something that doesn't appear elsewhere.

'''Predator:''' A robotic panther that attacks with an area of effect shockwave around it, but is [[FAIL|too fragile and expensive to consider using]]. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Hercules.

'''Wraith:''' Standard Terran starfighter that also sports a personal cloaking field; fragile, but hits like a brick to the head against enemy air unit and a wet noodle against ground units. Replaced by the Viking in the sequel but is playable in the campaign.

'''Science Vessel:''' Non-combat space station that can penetrate enemy cloaking efforts, deploy protective forcefields, and coat enemies in a toxic radiological fog. In SC2, they gained the ability to repair nearby mechanical units too but are exclusive to the campaign as an alternative to the Raven, which you'll never take since the Science Vessel's repair beam is too good to pass up. Humorously, it's one of the largest units in fluff (to the point an entire mission is set inside one) but looks barely larger than a Siege Tank in game.

'''Dropship:''' Basic flying transport with no gimmicks unlike the speedy Protoss Shuttle or the invisibility detecting Zerg Overlord.

'''Valkyrie:''' UED-designed anti-air frigate that takes down masses of light enemy flyers with clusters of missiles, but can't deal with heavily armored vessels and is defenseless against ground units.

'''Viking:''' Anti-air flyer that can transform into a ground-based anti-<s>infantry</s>armor combat walker. Its lore makes it known for its a steep learning curve and high attrition rate claiming the lives of many trainees trying to master its transformation sequence, which makes you wonder how it [[Derp|became the new standard fighter jet in the sequel]].

'''Banshee:''' A cloaked anti-ground aerial bombardment VTOL that is flexible in both base raiding and dealing with enemy ground forces.

'''Raven:''' AI-controlled support craft replacing the Science Vessel as the Terran's detector-spellcaster flying unit, which can create and deploy various drone units for different purposes.

'''Medivac:''' SC2 replacement for the Dropship and Medic, combining both into a transport that can also heal biological units like a Medic.

'''Warhound:''' Badass anti-armor mech that was [[Cheese|too strong and unable to be balanced]] and was thus cut from the game, but still shows up as enemy units in the Heart of the Swarm campaign. Hilariously the thing was intended to break stalemates caused by Siege Tanks, those actually proved to be one of the few things that could counter it during tests.

'''HERC:''' Asteroid miners conscripted into the military. Armed with a grappling gun that can pull itself into the fray or up cliffs, and a highly specific immunity to Zerg suicide bombers, they didn't make it into the main game since the Hellbat fulfills the same niche of tanking hordes of lightly armored units. Exclusive to the Nova Covert Ops DLC campaign.

'''Widow Mine:''' The descendant of Spider Mines taking heavy inspiration from the Zerg's burrowing capabilities. You get a drone that can burrow itself and shoot airburst missiles over nearby enemies, dealing [[Rape|massive damage to clumped up enemies]]. However, they will deal friendly fire so be wary of engaging fast melee enemies near them.

'''Cyclone:''' Missile truck that can lock onto an enemy, firing a continuous volley of missiles while still being able to move as long as the enemy remains in range, making it ideal for "kiting" and dismantling slow armored enemies but it can't deal with masses of cheap units or heavy long ranged firepower.

'''Hercules:''' Massive and incredibly tough, but also very slow, flying transport. Unlike other transports, its passengers deploy almost instantly and will make an emergency landing albeit taking some damage if it gets destroyed. Exclusive to SC2's campaign as the alternative to the Predator.

'''Liberator:''' Flying artillery unit that can switch between anti-air and anti-ground missile barrages, making it sort of a lovechild between a Valkyrie and a Siege Tank. Unlike the Siege Tank, it can only rain death upon units inside a player-designated killzone and doesn't do splash damage.

'''Battlecruiser:''' Fuckoff huge warship armed with batteries of lasers and a mega-energy cannon. In LotV, it also gains the ability to warp jump to any point on the map. In the original they relied on a sorta big laser (despite the attack saying it was a battery of lasers) that didn't pack as much of a punch as you would expect. In the sequel they fire a barrage of small lasers that because they are a bunch of small attacks can't be reduced by armor (since armor can't reduce damage to zero). In both games it can fire its big gun as an ability which destroys most targets instantly.
* SC2 has a few missions with a version called the Gorgon, the biggest and most powerful ship used by the Terrans. When first fought in Heart of the Swarm they are immune to all conventional attacks and abilities (even from Kerrigan). The only way to destroy them is to use a nest of full Scourges. You sorta get control of them in a DLC Terran campaign where you have a calldown ability that sends Gorgons in a straight line to shoot everything in their path. They aren't indestructible in this level but they have more than six times as much health, double the armor, more than triple the firepower of a normal battlecruiser and as much range as a Siege Tank. It's easy to see why you don't get to directly control these monsters.

====Factions====
'''Terran Confederacy (defunct):''' One of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they are ostensibly modeled after the Confederate States of America down to using its battle flag to represent itself. A [[High Lords of Terra|corrupt, decadent and feudalistic]] power from Tarsonis, they are aggressive against their neighbors and deal with dissidents using excessive force, such as the nuking of Korhal, which ended up being their undoing. Despite being overthrown by Arcturus Mengsk, Confederate holdouts continue opposing the Dominion or sell their services as mercenaries. They were known to have conducted experiments on Zerg to use them as potential bioweapons and on psionic humans to turn them into Ghosts, [[FAIL|both of which were turned against them by Mengsk.]]

'''Umojan Protectorate:''' Another one of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, [[Tau|they control the smallest number of planets and rely on highly advanced technology]] over mass conscription or material wealth. Opposing the militaristic Confederacy, they aided the father of Arcturus Mengsk and later his Sons of Korhal rebel group, until they realized that Mengsk was no better than the Confederates and withdrew support. They are willing to cooperate with his son, Valerian Mengsk, who is much less of a power hungry madman that his father is.

'''Kel-Morian Combine:''' The last of the initial Terran powers in the Koprulu Sector, they own many planets rich in resources and function more like a corporation than a country. Despite being brought low by the Confederacy, they nevertheless continued amassing wealth and remaining neutral, even when the UED entered the fray. Lacking a large military force, they rely more on subterfuge and diplomacy over brute force, paying off rivals to leave them alone and even hiring pirates and mercenaries for more underhanded work. After the games, they are looking to contest the now weakened and still recovering Dominion for territory.

'''Terran Dominion:''' The main antagonistic Terran faction replacing the Confederacy, it was formed by charismatic ex-Confederate officer Arcturus Mengsk after overthrowing the Confederacy in revenge for assassinating his family and nuking his homeworld. Revealing himself to be no less tyrannical than the Confederates he overthrew, Mengsk turned the Dominion into a strong but dystopian empire, where his propaganda laden speeches are played regularly and citizens live in fear of being resocialized or conscripted for [[1984|wrongthink]]. Ultimately, Arcturus was overthrown by Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan, and his son Valerian took over his position as Emperor, repealing many oppressive laws and introducing many social reforms to show that he isn't a tyrant like his father, most notably turning the military into a volunteer force rather than relying on resocialized criminals and conscription.

'''United Powers League (defunct):''' The ruling government of Earth, they were [[Imperium|a fascist, atheist one world government]] [[Nazi|obsessed with human purity]] and [[Inquisition|led many bloody purges]] against dissidents, cyborgs, mutants and others deemed too degenerate from the human form that were covered up by the media. They kickstarted the Terrans' story when one UPL scientist, certain of new resources outside the solar system, collected 4 colony ships worth of prisoners and sent them to colonize an outlying planet. However, the ships [[Not As Planned|missed their destination]] and crashed in the Koprulu sector, their passengers forming the major Terran powers in the sector.

'''United Earth Directorate:''' After knowledge of the Zerg and Protoss reached the United Powers League on Earth, the squabbling factions decided to band together against the potential xenos threat. They sent an expedition fleet to the Koprulu sector with the intent to subjugate the Terrans under the UED's banner, establish control over the Zerg and use them to purge the Protoss. Through some clever tactics and brute force, they managed to overthrow the Terran Dominion, enslave the new Zerg Overmind and usurp Kerrigan's control over majority of Zerg forces and beat back the Protoss. Only a desperate alliance between the Terrans, Protoss and Kerrigan managed to defeat the UED before Kerrigan betrayed her allies, then finished off the UED expedition fleet when they in turn allied with the angry Terrans and Protoss against her. The remaining UED forces, now stuck in the Koprulu sector, have been absorbed into the Dominion or became mercenaries, and the main UED government continues to plot its next move in the background. They are hinted to have highly advanced technology that they didn't bring to the Koprulu sector due to...BEING TOO ADVANCED. To the point they had to use the same type of equipment the Terrans use because there was absolutely no facilities in the Koprulu Sector that would've maintained their own tech.

====Terran Characters====
'''James "Jim" Raynor''': The main protagonist of the faction and the players avatar in the Terran Campaign of Starcraft 1 and Wings of Liberty. An Ex-Convict and veteran of several corporate wars between the Confederacy and the Kel-Morian mining combinate, who, by the merit of being the only guy left who could hold a gun, was named Confederate Marshal of the Tatoonine-expy planet of Mar Sara. Had an overall decent run as Marshal, but he found himself stuck between the Zerg, who came to nom his planet and the Protoss which arrived to [[Kryptman|glass the planet to deny it to the swarm.]] As the Confederacy abandoned him, he turned to the Sons of Korhal under Mengsk for aid, which started his stunt into being a rebel. When Mengsk stabbed him and Kerrigan in the back, he seceded with his squad from the Sons, founding Raynor's Rangers to continue the rebellion, this time against the Dominion, only for him to be backstabbed ''again'' by Kerrigan when they drove out the UED during the Brood War campaign. SC2 changed his character in various ways, not all of which were well received. The most divisive change was his sudden attraction to pre-Zergification-Kerrigan, which felt to many to come out of nowhere (mostly because Blizzard is Blizzard, they had outsourced much of this background to tie-in novels) and a bit misplaced; to say the least, as he had vowed that he would be the man to kill her once the time comes at the end of Brood War. He starts off Wings of Liberty as being throughly miserable due to all the backstabbing and ends the first chapter of SC2 being reunited with his girlfriend and spending the other chapters of SC2 being mostly moral support for Kerrigan and Artanis. Character-wise, he is somewhat of a disgruntled veteran who somehow always ends up being where shit is going down ''hard'' and just throughly tired of everything by the end of it. However, he is a good leader and a true friend to those he likes and hardly ever dishonest, even when it's to his own detriment (as seen with the various times he has been betrayed by his closest allies). He disappears from the story at the end of Legacy of the Void with Kerrigan to.... somewhere. We're not quite sure. But it probably involves copious amounts of [[/d/|extradimensional sex.]]

'''Arcturus Mengsk''':The ice-cold pragmatic leader of the Sons of Korhal and later the Terran Dominion, the largest of the four Terran nations. If you forgot who the other three were, don't worry, Blizzard did too. His backstory was that he was the scion of a noble family on Korhal (hence the name) that got killed when his father pissed off the Confederacy. Ironically (or not so ironically, as we'll see in a couple sentences), Kerrigan was the one who killed his family. He was already kind of a scumbag at the start of SC1, recruiting most of his allies at gunpoint; Raynor was left with the choice of either joining him or be murderfucked out of this plane of existence by the combined might of the Protoss and Zerg, Duke was literally recruited at gunpoint. Later on, he found a bunch of psionic gizmos that he could use to lure the Zerg to the Confederate homeworld of Tarsonis (and accepting Billions of civilian casualties as collateral), used them despite the strong opposition from Kerrigan, Raynor and Duke to this plan and succeeded - only for him to betray all of his allies then and there, leaving Kerrigan and Raynor to die on Tarsonis for his own petty revenge. He then collected the fractured Confederate military to found the Dominion in its stead, with him as military dictator no less, and not that much better than the Confederacy when it comes to his policies. During the Brood War, his six months in the sun came to a sudden end when the UED arrived on the scene and he only survived because Raynor of all people saved his ass. After the UED's expulsion from the Koprulu sector, he promptly reestablished his Dominion and mainly serves as the friendly face of Dominion Propaganda during the Wings of Liberty campaign. Despite being supposedly one of the big bads of Starcraft, he actually never gets all that much screentime, especially in Starcraft 2, where his most memorable moment might actually be his death, being impaled by re-Zergified Kerrigan and then having a psionic bomb implanted in him.

'''November "Nova" Terra''': If Kerrigan is Starcraft's Fap-Bait number 1, Nova very closely follows at number two. Nova is a bit of an interesting tidbit in the Starcraft story because the game that was supposed to bring her to the forefront never came out. She was conceptualized as the protagonist of the third-person-shooter Starcraft: Ghost, first announced in 2002 and then cancelled in 2005. It even had its own cinematic trailer. She later made a reappearance in Wings of Liberty, where she warns Raynor about Gabriel Tosh and his true intentions (and also gives him the knowledge to create Ghosts along the way, funny how she betrays her own government and never faces any punishment for it). Due to being a hot blonde, there was instant fan demand for more of her and they got more of her as Starcraft 2 went on, eventually being pushed to main character level in her own standalone campaign for Starcraft 2 that wraps up some of the loose ends that Legacy of the Void left behind. She has gotten a crapload of supplemental material for such a minor character that expanded on her (actually quite tragic) backstory. Her family was murdered as a result of some political intrige in the Confederacy. She killed the murderers right back in a psionic explosion, where it turned out that was only second to Kerrigan in Psionic potential. Now, before you, dear reader might think this pushes her into Mary Sue-territory, this comes with the serious downside that she, unlike lesser psionics, could not stop reading and hearing other peoples thoughts, which made her very dependent on a drug dealer, who kept her compliant with a device to suppress her psionic potential and abused the fuck out of her. Later on, she escaped her boss and made it to the Ghost Academy of the Confederacy, who routinely subjected her to mindwipes to erase her identity. From then, she stayed a hapless victim of the people in charge, be it the Confederacy, the UED or Mengsk who kept her as their most skilled assassin in their backpocket. Little of that complexity or interesting stuff remains in the games however, where she is a very bland, forgettable villain that throws edgy one-liners (not even [[Avatar: The Last Airbender|Grey DeLisle aka Princess Azula can save her character]] ) and an even blander protagonist in her own very mediocre campaign.

'''Matthew Horner''': Goody two-shoes idealist right hand of Raynor in Wings of Liberty. Despite his kinda bland exterior, he proves that still waters can reach really deep. For one, he basically managed Raynor's Raiders while his boss drank his worries away, two, he is a kickass commander with the skill to boot, and third, he ended up accidentally being married to an insane mercenary warlord as the prize of a poker game. Other than that, he serves as the ever idealistic, morally upstanding angel on Raynors shoulder, in contrast to Tychus Findlay, who plays the devil. Ends up becoming the Commander-in-chief of the reformed Dominion after Starcraft 2.

'''Rory Swann''':

'''Gerard DeGalle''': Main commanding officer of the UED expeditionary fleet, he ends up falling under the psychic influence of Samir Duran (a being pretending to be the leader of Confederate remnant partisans) which costs him the life of his subordinate and close friend, Alexei Stukov. After he gets his ass handed to him by Kerrigan after a last-ditch alliance between him, Mengsk and Artanis, he commits suicide after writing a last letter to his family. Neither the letter, nor the remnants of the expeditionary force make it back to Earth.

'''Valerian Mengsk''': Arcturus's son who luckily happens to have none of the colossal asshole genes. In fact, he tries to be more of a reasonable leader than his father, especially after being forced to succeed the role of Emperor of the UED.

'''Edmund Duke''':

'''Tychus Findlay''': One of Raynor's partners way back in the day as the "Heaven's Devils". Got arrested during one raid gone wrong and was locked up in cryosleep until such a point where Mengsk decided to wake him up use him as a mole within Raynor's ranks (and his personality meant that a cover story of breaking free by himself would totally make sense) and to kill Kerrigan. Depending on who you ask, he's either a scumbag only looking for his own personal benefit or thug with a heart of gold, with the most fiercely debated part of Wings of Liberty being his death - he was either a douchebag who kept his own self-interest above all else and potentially screw the entire universe sideways by killing Kerrigan, or he took one for the team because he just wanted Raynor to be happy and realized that he was screwed either way. There are pointers and hints in the Wings of Liberty Campaign that support both ends of this theory and we best it at that.

===[[Tyranids|The Zerg]]===
A race of alien space-locusts armed with biological weaponry, the Zerg travel from world to world, killing all independent life and assimilating its genetic code in order to produce new strains and species of Zerg, all in hope of achieving genetic perfection. In their wake, they infest worlds, terraforming them to sustain the Zerg's constant expansion of its terrible Swarm. Individually sentient, but linked by a crude telepathic network, all Zerg are bound to the will of a singular sapient will, who use this [[Hive Mind|hive-mind]] to enforce their dominance and command their legions as extensions of themselves.

It was eventually revealed though, that the Overmind's actions were not solely to OMNOMNOM delicious genetic information of the protoss like their [[Tyranid|voracious cousins]], which the Zerg could probably give a run for their money if it wasn't for the difference in galactic wide numbers, but as his way of opposing a Xel'Naga named Amon by creating a force powerful enough to resist them. This all culminated with the creation of Kerrigan(we're getting to her, hang on...), one who could freely control the Zerg like the Overmind. It should be noted that he still wanted the zerg to eat everything, but not if it means Amon will just take control of them and dispose of them afterwords. The Overmind "tricked" the protoss into killing him to get Amon out of the zerg hive-mind.

There is also a subsect of Primal Zerg, which are, as implied, the Zergs original form; a collection of carnivorous animals hailing from a Death World at the edge of the known Galaxy. Their ability to directly and quickly absorb genetic traits and incorporate it into their own DNA (i.e. big Zerg with claws eats small Zerg with spikes, what makes the big Zerg grow spikes when it consumed the smaller Zerugs flesh) was what got the Xel'Naga interested in them in the first place. The Primal Zerg, in contrast to their swarm cousins, are highly indivdualistic and put a strong emphasis on evolutional competition (less Darwinistic and more Smithian), to the point that they considered being kept on a psionic leash via the Overmind to be sacriligious.

Zerg are the "fast 'n' flimsy" faction; cheap to get up and running, very easy to spam units for, but the absolute squishiest of the three factions. Zergs rely on drowning enemies under wave after wave of cheap, quick-moving troops, expending their resources faster than any other faction because they're certain to die anyway. Unlike Terrans or Protoss, Zergs grow their bases quite slowly, as they have to sacrifice basic workers to create new buildings, and they can only grow buildings on a specialized, slowly-growing terrain mat they produce called "The Creep". On the other hand as their base buildings are very cheap compared to other factions, and also double as their unit-production buildings (with all others being "unlocks" for certain units or upgrades), Zergs are encouraged to expand faster and wider, generally having more resource-harvesting bases. This also corresponds to their ability to switch their army production from one composition to another in almost an instant, while for example if Terran wishes to start producing mechs instead of massed infantry he needs to build a lot of factories first, which takes resources and most importantly time.

In competitive play the Zerg are generally regarded as the baseline against which the others are compared. They are consistently good. They are the fastest of the three in terms of responding to immediate unit demands and their units don't tend to need micromanagement. Relative to the Zerg, the Terrans have a stronger midgame, and the Protoss are the kings of endgame if they can form their deathball.

In the original Starcraft, and Brood War, you play as a Cerebrate; a massive psionic maggot-thing that is second in the Zerg's mental hierarchy only to the Overmind itself. You are charged with protecting and serving the Overmind's latest and greatest creation; the Queen of Blades, a human Ghost (psychic assassin) named Sarah Kerrigan(told ya we'd be getting back to her!) whom they captured and assimilated into the Swarm instead of just eating her. After spending some time helping Kerrigan grow into her powers, the Overmind tasks you with invading the Protoss homeworld of Auir so he can manifest physically on the planet. When the Overmind is destroyed at the end of the first game, in Brood War, you play the only Cerebrate to remain loyal to the Queen of Blades, helping her in her quest to take total dominion over the Swarm - up to and including destroying an attempt to create a second Overmind. The campaign ends with you taking back Char and kicking the collective asses of the Dominion, the UED, and Protoss off the planet. The Queen of Blades is also notable for her combat heels which do FUCKING NOTHING as well as her bony "wings" which in the first game produce a whipping noise and cause things to blow up into sprays of gore and in the second do all of jack and shit because somehow she can fly in literally only one scene which they seemingly do nothing to cause; maybe they're hollow and full of pressurized Vespene or some shit.

In the Zerg-focused sequel, Heart of the Swarm, you play as Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, and only surviving zerg character from sc1 (Duran was something else) who voluntarily rejoins the Swarm to destroy the Dominion and to prepare for the coming of Amon. Kerrigan can be customized with different abilities which makes her really broken, and if she dies she can just be brought back at a hive cluster. All your units, non-campaign exclusive at least, have options for campaign exclusive abilities you can switch out, and you'll get the option of one other campaign exclusive upgrade for each of the main units that can't be switched out

====Zerg Units====
'''Larvae:''' The basic form of all Zerg, a squirming maggot-thing that is produced at your capital building (Hatchery/Lair/Hive) and which is mutated into all of your individual units. Because of this, Zerg are unique in that they generally require multiple capital buildings in order to be able to really pump out troops at an accelerated rate.

'''Drone:''' The worker unit of the Zerg. Gathers minerals and vespene gas. Is also physically mutated into all Zerg structures, so Zerg as a faction are unique in a) the cost and time needed to erect structures (first you gotta mutate a larva into a drone, then a drone into a structure), and b) the high turnover rate of their worker units.

'''Overlord:''' A kind of secondary worker unit, the Overlord is a slow-moving flyer and one of the few "sapient" breeds of Zerg, reinforcing and broadcasting the will of the Overmind to lesser strains. As such, the Zerg player needs to <s>spawn more Overlords</s>pump these guys out continually in order to boost up their population cap, letting them produce larger swarms. They also double as detectors against invisible units and transports... at least, in the first game; in StarCraft II, you need to choose between keeping them as transports or upgrading them into '''Overseers''' to make them detectors again.

'''Zergling:''' Basic melee trooper, a six-limbed raptor-thing that is fast moving and hits hard, but can't take a lot of damage. Incredibly cheap, fast-developing, and spawns 2 to the larva; the term "Zerg Rush" comes about from the fact that a good Zerg player can easily overwhelm a less-skiled player in the early game by just spamming zerglings. In StarCraft II, they can also be mutated into '''Banelings'''; living acid bombs used for suicide strikes.

'''Hydralisk:''' A weird mishmash of a xenomorph, a snake and a giant mantis, this is the most iconic Zerg unit. Despite the fuck-off huge claws, it's actually your basic ''ranged'' trooper, shooting organic railguns mounted in its head at people. Can be evolved into a creature called a '''Lurker''', which was the only burrowing Zerg unit that could attack whilst burrowed until StarCraft II, but on the downside can ''only'' attack whilst burrowed and only attack ground units.

'''Queen:''' A support unit that changes rapidly between the first game and the sequel. The first game depicts the Queen as a flying support unit that can spray a slowing, invisibility-cancelling sticky web over areas, infest enemies with a fog-of-war nullifying parasite, implant a parasitic embryo that insta-kills the host after a timer, and corrupt a Terran Command Center so it produces Infested Terrans, but can't attack (don't bother with this, you need to damage but not destroy building and the Infested Terrans are too expensive and die too easily). The second game reimagines them as a slow-moving base guardian that can spread the Creep, heal Zerg units & structres, and beat shit up that gets too close.

'''Roach:''' A secondary ranged trooper and alternative to the Hydralisk introduced in StarCraft II. Spews acid, dealing less damage than the Hydralisk but is much tankier and regenerates at stupid speeds while burrowed. One of two only units that can move while underground, making them powerful infiltrators. Can also evolve into the '''Ravager''', which is basically the Zerg's answer to the Siege Tank; a living acid mortar.

'''Scourge:''' An aerial equivalent of the zergling; a cheap, rapidly produced anti-air unit that works as a flying kamikaze bomb.

'''Mutalisk:''' The basic Zerg aerial unit; a flying worm-thing that launches ricocheting biological ammo called "Glaive Wurms". In the original StarCraft, they can be evolved into both '''Guardians''', which are slow-moving air-to-ground acid-spewing crab-things, and '''Devourers''', which are anti-air focused. In StarCraft II, they can instead mutate into either '''Vipers''' (flying scorpions focused on a combo of anti-air and spellcasting) or '''Brood Lords''' (anti-ground flyers which attack by raining down showers of short-lived broodlings).

'''Aberration:''' An evolved form of the Infested Terran only seen in StarCraft II. Hulking deformed spidery humanoids that are basically fit the midpoint between the Zergling and the Ultralisk as a mid-tier melee trooper.

'''Infestor:''' Support caster unit only seen in StarCraft II. Can paralyze enemies with fungal growth, take over minds with neural parasites, and spawn Infested Terrans as expendable grunts, but can't fight on its own. Can move while burrowed.

'''Swarm Host:''' A siege unit introduced in StarCraft II; a revisitation of the Lurker concept, this Zerg burrows into place and then spawns an endless wave of expendable suicide minions called "locusts".

'''Corruptor:''' A heavier anti-armor flyer introduced only briefly in StarCraft II. For some reason deals more damage to larger targets, also mutates into Brood Lords.

'''Defiler:''' Scorpion-like caster unit only seen in the original game. Has no attack, but uses energy-fueled Dark Swarm and Plague special attacks to ravage wide areas of effect. Can also insta-kill allied Zerg units to replenish its energy immediately.

'''Ultralisk:''' Most powerful melee trooper the Zerg have, a demonic elephant-thing that slices foes apart with huge scythe-blade talons. Deceptively fast despite how big it is but its bulk means it can get stuck.

'''Infested Terran:''' Terran Marines consumed by Zerg parasites. Gimmicky suicide bombers in the first game that aren't worth using because it requires you to infest a Terran Command Center after bringing down to half health, as opposed to blowing it up, and while their explosion does the most damage of any attack in the game they die way too easily. Expendable ranged troopers produced by Infestors in the second game, where they are actually worth using.

'''Nydus Worm:''' Blurring the line between building and unit, a giant worm introduced in StarCraft II that can basically act as a kind of fast transport for Zerg units.

====Zerg Characters====
'''The Overmind:''' Essentially the Tyranid [[Hive Mind]], except it has a physical body and is a distinct consciousness separate from the rest of the Zerg. Dies at the end at the Brood War, but its remains prove to be valuable long after. The Overmind was created by Amon as part of his plot to subjugate the entire galaxy in order to have something to make sure that the Zerg would nom the right people, but the Overmind became aware that he was secretly controlled by him and assimilated Kerrigan to create a being that was powerful enough to lead the Zerg into freedom. Looks like a [[Sauron|giant eyeball]]. The Primal Zerg regarded the Overmind as a perversion of their racial ethos, which emphasized biological evolution on an individual level, in contrast to the Overminds version of evolution as a collective swarm and considered the creation of the Overmind as one of the single biggest crimes committed against their species.

'''Cerebrates:''' Enormous psionic maggots who basically serve as lieutenants to the Overmind. You play as one of these in the Starcraft 1 and Brood War Zerg Campaigns. These guys all get killed off by Kerrigan after they decide that they don't like the idea of playing second fiddle to a filthy half-human and instead turn against her to try and grow a replacement Overmind. What happened to the one remaining loyal Cerebrate that ''you'' played is never made clear.

'''Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades:''' Originally a Ghost under the Confederacy until Mengsk stabs her in the back and feeds her to the Zerg. This results in her mutating into a superhuman monster that's now psychic and has a massive grudge against humanity and that gets worse when she gets command of the entire Zerg Swarm following the Overmind's death. Being the most powerful human psyker ever conceived, she was abducted by the Confederacy and trained into being a government hitwoman, similar to Nova, but unlike the latter, she fumbled an operation to kill Mengsk and found herself at his mercy; luckily for her, he saw her being useful in his service and unveiled the truth about the government she was serving, which promptly made her switch sides, only for Mengsk to betray her on Tarsonis. SC2 sees her transformed back into a human-zerg hybrid, which doesn't sit well with her when she sees her boytoy Raynor supposedly being killed and goes full Super Saiyan on Mengsk by transforming ''back'' into the Queen of Blades. It also turned out that she is the central object of an age-old prophecy concerning Amons revival and becomes a fully-fledged angel at the very end of SC2, in one of the derpiest
video game stories ever devised.

'''Alexei Stukov:''' A scummy Russian admiral of the United Earth Directorate who died during the Brood War as part of a lengthy political game. However, death was not the end for him as his space-coffin got captured by the Zerg and Stukov reanimated as a lab experiment to see how a Cerebrate can infect a human into a leader and then caught by another lab to see how to cure it. He would eventually break free of this and find himself allying with Kerrigan in his search for revenge.

'''Abathur:''' Chief mutationist NPC for Heart of the Swarm. He is a simple-minded, slug-looking thing that is obsessed with creating the perfect organism for the Zerg swarm and best remembered for his robotic way of speaking. He was also the guy... uhm, thing looking over Kerrigans initial transformation into the Queen of Blades which is described in agonizing detail in Heart of the Swarm (which basically involved breaking every single bone in her body, skinning her alive in acid and replacing it all with a Zerg exoskeleton).

'''Zagara:''' One of the first Brood Queens Kerrigan made in an attempt to make more autonomous leader organisms. While she had the mental power to lead the Zerg, she wasn't necessarily good at using it and lacked the tactical experience to succeed at it. Kerrigan would teach Zagara as a mentor. Would assume control of the swarm as supreme Overqueen once Kerrigan went off to be a mary-sue god.

'''Dehaka''': One of the Primal Zerg of Zerus, a sapient, individual being looking like a half-way cross between a sabretooth tiger and a dinosaur. He comes to respect Kerrigan for her killing of one of the oldest Zerg to have ever existed (a gigantic monstrosity the size of a small mountain) and joins her merry crusade because he feels that she could provide the best essence for his own evolution.

===[[Eldar|The Protoss]]===
Highly advanced psychic warriors, the Protoss are an ancient and highly technologically advanced race, possessing access to teleportation tech, forcefields, cybernetic exo-suits, robots and energy weapons...but [[Meme|you must construct additional pylons]]. They are divided into two primary factions: the Khalai and the Nerazim, but derogatively called by the Khalai as "Dark Templars". The difference is more cultural than anything: Khalai draw their psychic energy from "The Khala", the collective mental energy subconsciously produced by all Protoss, which they mentally tap into and use for communication or psionic energy storms. Nerazim abandoned the Protoss homeworld of Aiur generations ago over their belief that the Khala was unnatural, and brought the risk of reducing Protoss to mindless drones in a great mental hive. Metaphorically and literally severing themselves from the Khala, they are instead able to tap into "the darkness between the stars", allowing for more shadowy psi-powers like invisibility and teleportation. Khalai generally tend to be lawful stupid, [[Imperium|full of self-righteousness, glory, honor, noble sacrifice and burning heretics]], while Nerazim are more pragmatic, cynical and bro-tier, if a bit sinister. The sequel introduces a third faction, the Tal'darim, who left Auir before the invention of Khala and thus have no external source to empower their psychic powers - they compensate by using psychic drugs and taking power from their subordinates. They worship Xel'Naga and built an insane society based on social Darwinism and strict hierarchy - less [[Dark Eldar]], more Sith Order(complete with edgy black clothes and red lightsabers) with more straightforwardness and less backstabbing.

Protoss are the "slow 'n' tough" faction; they're extremely expensive and slow to produce, but they can take a hell of a beating, thanks to all their units and buildings coming with forcefields as standard (for example in direct confrontations their basic warrior the Zealot in both games will win against its counterparts the Marine and the Zergling if equal resources are put into them, not taking into account other supports). They fall between Terrans and Zerg when it comes to base building; uniquely, they teleport their buildings into place so they need fewer builders, but they need established power-grids, otherwise their buildings won't work. This also gives them a key infrastructure weakness, as it means you can cause buildings to stop working if you destroy the (conveniently fragile) generators powering them. Protoss armies tend to be "deathballs" relying on a single concentrated fist brutally plowing through the enemy defenses, while casually soaking up incoming damage, although vulnerable to being simultaneously attacked from multiple directions or being outmaneuvered, with enemy armies bypassing said deathball and attacking the Protoss base directly.

In the original Starcraft, you play as a Khalai Executor (A Templar commander, confirmed to be Artanis) seeking to defend Aiur, the Protoss homeworld, from the coming Zerg invasion. Things go not as planned by the end of the campaign due to internal strife.

In the Brood War, you play as an Executor (speculated to be Selendis, a student of Artanis) seeking to help the Protoss survive after they have been driven from Aiur by relocating them to the Dark Templar world of Shakuras, which is more problematic than it sounds due to the fact that Khalai Templars see the Dark Templars as heretical outcasts (although the Dark Templars themselves were more than welcoming of their holier-than-thou brethren). If you thought the first campaign was filled with political dissent since Tassadar's shenanigans, this has as much, if not more intra-species conflict.

In the Protoss-focused sequel, Legacy of the Void, you play as Artanis (the Tassadar fanboy) reuniting all the Protoss groups, retaking Aiur, blowing up Shakuras cause fuck you and making the preparations for the final showdown against Amon. Easily the darkest of Starcraft II's campaigns with about the first half being mostly pyrrhic victories against Amon, till Artanis goes on the offensive and starts getting some real (if a bit costly) victories. Eventually, they get Kerrigan to kill Amon, and let her hoof it to the dark corners of space with her boytoy Raynor.

Like Heart of the Swarm, you get variants for units. This varies from what you get normally to lots of campaign exclusive units, which includes lots of OP stuff like cloaked warriors that can comeback if killed. But the real fun comes from this giant ship called the Spear of Adun that can do anything from kill enemies with giant guns or giant lasers, to automatically constructing an additional pylon wherever you want and warp your army straight to it.

====Protoss Units====
'''Probe:''' The Protoss' worker unit. Its unique gimmick is that it ''summons'' structures into place, so rather than needing to devote multiple workers to building like the Terrans and Zerg, a Protoss player can have a single little robot running around and planting magical energy bubbles wherever the player wants buildings to pop into existence.

'''Zealot:''' Basic melee trooper; a Protoss warrior who [[Soulknife|punches things with daggers of concentrated hate]]. My life for Aiur! Is the strongest of the basic units, being the only one that can survive a hit from a Siege Tank's big gun.

'''Dragoon:''' Basic ranged trooper; a mortally wounded Zealot stuck in a walking life support unit mixed with a plasma-blasting turret, ala a [[Dreadnought]]. Largely absent for most of StarCraft II, replaced with the newly invented '''Immortal''' (much tankier, and with twin dual-linked blasters meant for punching through armor) and the '''Stalker''' (the Dark Templar analogue, able to teleport short distances). Eventually it returned in Legacy of the Void's campaign where they hit harder and deal more damage.

'''Adept:''' Female Protoss warriors armed with teleportation and psi-powered blasters. Introduced in StarCraft II.

'''High Templar:''' Protoss mystic that can't attack, but can cast a number of useful spells, including blasting an area with a psionic lightning storm. Two High Templars can merge into an '''Archon''', an [[elemental]] of pure psionic energy that has great shielding, but shitty health, and has no spells, but instead blasts ground and air targets with [[rape|psi-beams]]. In recent balance patches High Templars gained an attack that does as much damage as a thrown water balloon.

'''Dark Templar:''' Perma-cloaked Protoss [[assassin]]s with [[Soulknife|beefier versions of the Zealot's psi-blade]]. Initially appeared as campaign only units in the first game before the expansion. Gains teleportation in StarCraft II. Two Dark Templars can merge into a '''Dark Archon''' in Brood War & StarCraft II, which is like an Archon that has the spellcasting abilities of a High Templar. It's weaker than the regular Archon in direct combat but still powerful due to their unique abilities which include mind control. Legacy of the Void's campaign brought it back where it's built like a normal unit and can now fight. It's not as strong as a regular Archon, though it's still really strong packs really strong spells.

'''Sentry:''' Robotic support drone that can broadcast protective energy fields to make allies tankier, block off paths with forcefield walls and project illusions of protoss units that [[Wat|can fly around and see things independently, making them great scouts]].

'''Reaver:''' Slug-like robotic tanks that need to build its ammunition - kamikaze robot drones called "Scarabs" - individually. Packs a hell of a punch, but expensive and slow moving.

'''Colossus:''' Giant walkers with insanely long legs that rake the ground with heat rays. They are so tall they can casually walk up and down cliffs, but are vulnerable to anti-air fire. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Disruptor:''' Robot drone that can launch exploding bolts of pure psionic energy. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Observer:''' A Probe reworked into an invisible scout and detector of cloaked enemy units.

'''Shuttle:''' Basic Protoss transport ship. Replaced in StarCraft II with the '''Warp Prism''', which can both teleport units across the map and act as a fill-in pylon.

'''Scout:''' Basic Protoss aerial unit, able to attack both ground and air targets.

'''Corsair:''' Dark Templar-created aerial support caster that has (pitiful) anti-air attacks but the ability to paralyze ground units. A key component of Protoss's tendency to dominate the late game.

'''Carrier:''' Protoss battleship armed with a fleet of AI-controlled drones, called "Interceptors". These can be shot down and must be manually replaced, so they require a fair bit of micro-managing. While an iconic unit they struggled with attempts to make them viable due to the lack of damage from the Interceptors, to the point where SC2 just kept them around for the iconic status while the Tempest was meant to take up their role. Legacy of the Void finally made them viable since their Interceptors are made much cheaper and can be sent out away from the Carrier without it having expose itself to fire, meaning it can actually function like a real world aircraft carrier. In lore they have beams meant for glassing planets though you never get to use those in gameplay outside of version used by a CO-OP commander.

'''Arbiter:''' Support vessel only found in the original StarCraft and Legacy of the Void's campaign; can teleport allies, freeze enemies in an area, and passively renders nearby allies invisible. The last ability doesn't work on other Arbiters so you don't get to a invisible army with them.

'''Phoenix:''' Fast-moving anti-air skirmish ships with the ability to use a Graviton Beam to levitate ground units into the air so they can then blow them up. Slightly less obnoxiously OP than the Corsair it replaced.

'''Void Ray:''' Secondary offensive battleship that uses a focused laser beam attack; the longer it concentrates on one target, the more damage it does.

'''Tempest:''' Protoss battleship that acts as a ''very'' long-ranged siege unit, staying well out of harm's way and hurling destructive energy bolts.

'''Oracle:''' Aerial support caster that actually has surprisingly decent attack against Light type units, it detects hidden units, can peel back the fog of war, and paralyze things with its Stasis Ward. Only found in StarCraft II.

'''Mothership:''' The ultimate Protoss battleship...in theory. In practice, it had so many things going against it that the game eventually shifted to let you play with a wimpier version called the ''Mothership Core'' first that could then be upgraded into a proper Mothership. Actually, Motherships aren't battleships but support vessels. They replace Arbiters in StarCraft II as unit that cloaks and teleports allies. As a nice bonus can project fields of slowed time to reduce enemy movement speed and fire rates. Stronger versions tend to show up as boss enemies in campaigns. You never actually get to use the regular Mothership in Legacy of the Void's campaign, instead you get the Tal'Darim version that is more expensive, but significantly tougher, better armed, and its abilities are all focused on offense.

====Protoss Characters====
*'''Tassadar:''' The Protoss POV character for the first game, whom questions the pointless exile of the Dark Templars as they proved to be vital to the survival of their race and gets branded a [[heresy|heretic]] in return. Unfortunately, he martyrs himself when the Zerg attack Aiur.

*'''Zeratul:''' One of the few Dark Templars who manage to make friends with both Tassadar and Raynor, being rational enough to understand when he'd need help. He gets tricked by Duran into giving away the location of Aiur to the Zerg Overmind, which ends with Aiur being eaten by the Zerg and him being branded a renegade. In SC2, he becomes the guy who figures out long before anyone else what is actually going in the universe and scrambles to keep the sector from eating itself, but barely anyone listens to him. He sacrifices himself to free Artanis from Amons control.

*'''Artanis:''' Tassadar's protégé and POV character for Brood War and Legacy of the Void. Eventually finds a way to unite all of the Protoss kindred against Amon. Starts out as a zealous crusader befitting of his station as Templar Executor, softens up after the events of SC1 and Brood War to become an idealist hell-bent on reclaiming Aiur, but unlike Matt Horner or Ariel Hanson isn't afraid to cut you to size if you cross him.

*'''Fenix:''' Artanis' friend who sacrifices himself to protect the gates as the Protoss fled from Aiur.
**'''Talandar:''' So during Legacy of the Void, Artanis comes across knowledge of the Purifiers, an abandoned army of [[Transformers|transforming]] Protoss [[Dreadnoughts]] who are programmed with the memories of their dead brethren. Among them was one who carried the memories of Fenix. Though he stuck to this story at first, he eventually realized that just because he had Fenix's memories didn't necessarily mean that he had to be Fenix. Thus, the name change to Taldanis.

*'''Alarak:''' The leader of the Tal'darim, a subrace of Protoss who essentially channel the [[Dark Eldar]] and is delightfully voiced by John DeLancie. Alarak finds that the current policy of the Tal'darim aiding Amon is proving to be less useful than allying with his own kindred, especially once he finds out that Amon was betraying his kind as well. He's just as deceitful as one expects, only upholding his deal to not betray Artanis because of their non-aggression pact. Dishes out priceless insults by the minute against everyone he meets, including his own kin.

===[[Old Ones|The Xel'Naga]]===
A highly advanced alien race... and the cause of all this misery. See, they helped shape the Protoss into the powerful psykers they are today, and then got booted off of Aiur. They then created the Zerg, and got eaten for it - but one of them survived (though he died too, he was just revived). Amon secretly manipulated the Overmind into seeking out the Protoss, and serves as the big bad of the Starcraft II trilogy, with his plans to create an army of Zerg/Protoss hybrids and then annihilate all life (and energy, rendering everything dark and still) in the galaxy, so he can start over from scratch.

The background revealed that the Xel'Naga always wanted the Protoss and Zerg to meet and merge and form into the new Xel'Naga, it turns out the Protoss didn't kick them off Aiur they were just done with them. Amon's just an asshole who messed up the Zerg before they were done. In addition, the Xel'Naga never really put Terrans into account, in part because they never directly toyed around with humanity (since they developed psychic powers through mutation during spess travel, rather convenient) and in Amon's case grossly underestimated mankind throwing a wrench into his plans. Terrans also make the perfect slaves to build the machines that create the Hybrid.
*'''Amon''':
*'''Samir Duran''': A duplicitous Amon-adjacent being that secretly pulled the strings to aid his masters return and create a Zerg-Protoss hybrid army. First introduced during Brood War, he poses as a Confederate Remnant militia leader who joins the UED and aids them in their project to create a UED-controlled Zerg Cerebrate, a plan which royally backfires on the UED and ends up with all of them being killed. That he is not quite what he claims to be is being made clear in the secret missions of Brood War, where he unveils the first Hybrid-Prototype. He resurfaces in Wings of Liberty under the guise of a Professor Narud (real clever there, Blizzard) and advances his plot by posing as a scientist that wants to reclaim Xel'naga artifacts while getting his funding from Valerian. Wings of Liberty's secret mission in conjunction with the plot of Heart of the Swarm implies that he also talked Mengsk and the Dominion into creating Hybrids in a ultra-top-secret R&D lab.

===Post-Starcraft 2===
The Zerg are controlled by an independent feminine Overmind that calls up the humans and Protoss on the phone sometimes in order to have peace because Mommy Kerrigan told her to, humanity is clearly evolving into something far stronger and is increasingly incorporating nanomachines and crystal tech into their bodies as well as zerglike manifestations of mutation, and the Protoss civilization has no clue what its doing in the future because every time they run out to the grocery store for milk and eggs they come across another group of exiles from their race with radical new ways of looking at things that skullfucks their current understanding of their own civilization sideways. Oh yeah, and the UED may still be watching everything going on in the Koprulu sector because they have nothing else to do

So...happy ending for now?

As of October 2020, Starcraft 2 has been put into maintenance mode, with Blizzard announcing that they would cease any content updates in the future. Many saw it coming as Starcraft 2 dropped a lot in popularity once the MOBA games took off in popularity (much to Blizzards anger) and most content packs after the release of the last expansion for the game itself were met with mixed success. Blizzard made a last attempt at putting SC 2 in the spotlight again by turning it into a Freemium-Game in 2017 with equally mixed results.

[[File:Risk StarCraft|thumb]]
[[File:Risk Starcraft|thumb|Playing field and all available models]]
===/tg/ relevance===
Aside from having ideas worth mining for space games, StarCraft has been ported to Risk, thankfully with changes to core gameplay to make it resemble its vidya parent closer.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:3875524-1342590432983.jpg|<s>fixed for accuracy</s> While <s>accurate</s> not accurate at all, the railguns/Gauss rifles (you know, the same electromagnetic type that the Tau use as their BFG, just smaller) Marines carry can turn pretty much anything across sci-fi into Swiss cheese, but also note that Starcraft's Marines are the Guardsmen, more specifically the '''Penal Legion''' cannonfodder unit in their universe, and Space Marines are the most elite fighting force of the Imperium asides from the GK and Custodes. Almost all Marines are either so dumb they barely know what side of their gun the bullets come from, are brainwashed and mindraped and drugged up until they're like angry robots, or are disorganized pirate mercenaries.
File:Starcraft zelot by eloblazewicz-d9e7f4j.jpg|My life for Aiur!
File:Latest.png|The Zerg rape train has no brakes
File:Hybrid.jpg|Hybrid Reaver
File:Swarm host.jpg|Mother of the endless Locust swarm
</gallery>

{{Alternity}}

Middle Earth characters

2023-03-10T02:44:14Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Gondorians, Arnorians and Black Númenóreans */

Much like [[Star Wars|a certain other popular franchise that is the bread and butter of nerds everywhere]], describing even the cursory information is a massive job. But hey, that's what we're here for. Below you'll find a guide to the many beings who call Middle Earth home. For a guide to the places in Middle-Earth and the location itself, [[Middle Earth|see here]].

==Humans==
The second-born of [[God|Eru Ilúvatar’s]] children. Humans are split across many tribes and nations throughout Middle Earth. Unlike the immortal Elves, who are tied to the world and reincarnate in Aman if they die, the souls of men leave the world altogether to parts unknown by all save Ilúvatar himself. Men are also a mystery to everyone else in Middle Earth and are given "strange gifts," for they alone are able to shape their fates beyond the Music of the Ainur. It's noted that while Men are more corruptible to evil than the Elves and were the most similar to Morgoth in nature, Morgoth still greatly feared Men, including those who served him, since they were such an anomaly in Arda. Nevertheless, most [[Warriors of Chaos|of evil's footsoldiers in the franchise who aren't Orcs/Goblins/Uruk-hai are corrupted humans]]. Their capacity for corruption has, in fact, given the race of Man something of a mixed reputation among Elves, who sometimes regard them as weak. Luckily, there's always an Aragorn or Faramir just waiting to prove them wrong.

=== Edain of the First Age and Outlaws ===
The Edain were the first three tribes to arrive in Beleriand and make contact with the elves. The Edain and their descendants were staunch allies of the elves and the forces of good, despite taking terrible losses during the first age. It should also be noted that, while the elves were always superior to men in beauty, craft and wisdom, the Elves and Edain were equals in strength and endurance, and an Edain could be mistaken for an elf from long distance.
* '''Beren Erchamion''' (the Renowned in Sindarin) - Member of House of Bëor and the protagonist of "Beren and Lúthien" story. Is notable for [[Awesome|stealing a gem from the crown of Evil Satan guy]] and marrying an Elven woman (the first time in the Legendarium). Beren’s ring of Barahir becomes the only relic of the Numenorean Royal family that survives into the Third Age, used to mark Aragorn’s royal lineage. Based off of Tolkien himself, which is a ''bit'' self-indulgent on his part, but most would say the man earned it.
* '''Hurin Thalion:'''(the Steadfast) - One of mankind’s bravest warriors and a close ally of Turgon of Gondolin. He and his men fought to allow Turgon to escape Morgoth, with Hurin being the sole survivor. [[Grimdark|Morgoth tortured Hurin for the location of Gondolin, but Hurin refused to betray them, so Morgoth cursed Hurin’s children and for Hurin to witness their doom from afar]].
* '''Turin Turambar''' (Master of Doom) - Member of House of Hador, son of Hurin, known to be '''THE''' Kullervo expy way before [[Elric]]. Went from great hero to [[meme|An Hero]] thanks to Morgoth placing a curse over his family. It is said that he will finally get his revenge against Morgoth in the Dagor Dagorath (Middle-Earth's Ragnarok), by being the one to finally killing him.
* '''Tuor Eladar''' (the Blessed) - Cousin of Turin and a great human hero during the war with Morgoth, chosen by the vala Ulmo to find Gondolin and warn its inhabitants that the city will fall. In spite of Turgon's reluctance to leave he was able to convince the city's population to listen. Also married an elf princess and is the grandfather of Elrond. His symbol is the Swan, a motif kept by his human descendants.
* '''The Gaurwaith''': The Gaurwaith were a band of outlaws who Turin came to be in control of. They died in the battle at Amon Rûdh after Mîm's betrayal (see Mîm's section for the cause and details). Androg, the one indirectly responsible for the betrayal through an accidental murder, sacrificed himself to save Turin, Beleg and his own son Andvir. After Beleg was accidentally killed by Turin and Turin's suicide, Andvir was the last survivor. He related the portions of Turin's tale relevant to him to the poet Dirhaval, whose account of Turin's life make the primary source of the story of Hurin's family.
===== Followers of Melkor in the First Age =====
*'''Ulfang the Black''': Chief of one of two Easterling tribes that migrated westwards and became friends with Elves. [[Erebus|Unlike his fellow chieftain Bór the Faithful however, he was a traitor serving Morgoth all along.]] [[Horus Heresy|And yeah, his sons and tribesmen basically gave the Dark Lord the second biggest army in his service (after Orcs, of course).]]

=== Númenóreans ===
The Edain were rewarded by the Valar after the first age with their own island nation and extended lifespan; by 25 their aging slows down dramatically and can live for potentially hundreds of years, though they also have the ability to die willingly; some do before senility and infirmity sets in, but later Númenórians held on to their lives as long as possible out of fear of death. The Númenórian empire grew powerful, establishing many settlements across Middle Earth during the Second Age. However, Númenor was destroyed following a split between its people, as explained below.
*'''Pre-Schism Edain''':
** '''Elros''', or '''Tar-Minyatur''' as a King (Kings of Númenor always took an Elven Regnal name, and when that stopped -see below- it meant the end of the human golden age), was the first ruler of Númenor and Elrond's brother who chose a human fate (but still got around 500 years to live). He is also an ancestor of Aragorn.
** '''Tar-Minastir''': the eleventh king who ruled during the War of the Elves and Sauron; Minastir sent an army to aid the elves, but because Numenor had no standing army at the time, it took weeks to prepare an army and they arrived too late to save Eregion. Tar-Minastir's rule marks the beginning of Numenor's shift, as now they had a taste for war and an envy of the elves, and started permanent settlements in the mainland. But things wouldn't fully go south until the rule of his grandson Tar-Atanamir, as seen below.
*'''The King's Men''' - the majority faction in Númenor. With the support of the royal house, they were an Imperialist, faithless (later satanic), human-supremacist faction that opposed the Valar and desired power, wealth, and immortality. They would fall to Sauron's lies, and become the Black Númenóreans after Númenor's destruction.
** '''Tar-Atanamir''' - Founder of the King's Men faction and thirteenth king of Númenor. Atanamir openly opposed the Valar and Elves and coveted their immortality. Because men were forbidden to sail west, he sent his men east to start colonies in Middle Earth and subjugate the people living there, extracting its wealth for his kingdom, though he didn't have the balls to stop using an Elven name, the arrogant egomaniacs that followed him dropped that.
** '''Ar-Pharazôn the Golden''' - Last king of Númenor. Ar-Pharazôn usurped the throne from its rightful queen, his cousin Tar-Miriel, by [[Rape|a ''very'' forced marriage]]. Ar-Pharazôn defeated Sauron in open combat and brought him back to Númenor as a hostage to prove his might; this however turned out to be a trap, as [[Erebus|Sauron manipulated Pharazôn and the King's Men into believing that by worshipping Morgoth and making human sacrifices to him, they'd be able to challenge the Valar and take immortality for themselves, leading to Numenor's ruin]]. [[Fail|The moment Ar-Pharazôn and his men set foot on Aman, however, his armies became trapped beneath the Earth, Aman was permanently separated from the rest of the world, and Númenor sank beneath the seas as divine punishment]].
*'''The Faithful''' - the minority faction who still retained their devotion to Eru Ilúvatar and respect for the Valar and Elves. The Faithful became more oppressed over time by the King's Men.
**'''Tar-Palantir''' - The final Faithful king and second-to-last king of Númenor. Tar-Palantir tried his best to reverse the damage brought on by his predecessors, but it was too little too late, and much of Númenor's population opposed his policies. Tar-Palantir prophesied that the line of kings would end if the White Tree was felled; this came partially true, as the kings of Númenor ended with Ar-Pharazôn after he sacrificed the White Tree to Sauron, but a sapling of the tree was saved and the line of kings continued through the line of Elendil.
** '''Tar-Miriel''' - The daughter of King Tar-Palantir, and the last rightful heir of Númenor. Ar-Pharazôn was like "fuck that, I want to be in charge" and married her to get the power [[Rape|against her will]]. Sadly dies when Númenor goes under. Actually gets to be in charge in [[Skub|Rings of Power]] as Queen-Regent [[Wat|while her daddy's locked up as a prisoner in his own kingdom.]] Blinded later on, which in conjunction with her foresight gives her an "Oracle of Delphi" feel.
**'''Amandil''' - The last Lord of Andúnië, which is a cadet branch of the Royal line and had been the centre of the Faithful presence in Númenor; though once Amandil had been close friends with Ar-Pharazôn, the lordship had later been revoked, thanks to the cunning of Sauron. When Amandil had learned of Ar-Pharazôn's plans of invading Aman, he with three other servants travelled to the West to warn the Valar and have mercy upon Númenor. Though, just in case that plan didn't work, he also warned his son and grandchildren to flee the island with as many of the Faithful as they could find. Nothing more is known of Amandil's fate. Just as likely he could have died instantly as he stepped into Valinor, as he could have been welcomed by the Valar and become immortal, like Tuor.
**'''Elendil''' - Son of Amandil, Elendil and his family did their best to preserve their ancestor's traditions, including saving a fruit of the White Tree of Kings (Nimloth) before it was destroyed. They organised the evacuation fleet to Middle Earth during the fall of Númenor, where they settled new Kingdoms in Gondor and Arnor. As the new High King, Tar-Elendil lead the Men of the West during the War of the Last Alliance, where he fell in combat against Sauron.

=== Gondorians, Arnorians and Black Númenóreans ===
Gondor and Arnor were kingdoms established by the Faithful after the fall of Númenor. Though Arnor in the North fell to Angmar, Gondor lasted through the entire Third Age and well into the fourth, becoming the ''Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor'' (since the heir to Arnor's throne, Aragorn, inherited Gondor's, what with his original kingdom being gone and all).
* '''Isildur''' - second High King of both Gondor and Arnor. Finally defeated Sauron in the War of Last Alliance, but became a victim of One Ring's power and tragically died in an Orc ambush, leaving the Ring without a host for a while. Body was never found. Becomes a Nazgul in the Shadow of Mordor/War continuity, until Talion frees his spirit from Sauron's control...and then later takes his ring and his place as one of the Nine.
* '''Anarion'''- Isildur's brother, died before their father Elendil during the early months of the War of the Last Alliance.
* '''Gondorians''': The Dúnedain of the South. They are descendants of the Faithful from Númenor.
** '''Denethor II''' - Ruling Steward of Gondor at the beginning of the books. He originally was a great and capable ruler whose sanity was damaged by usage of the Anor-stone Palantir, as instead of helping in espionage against Sauron it showed [[Grimdark|the death of everyone and the triumph of evil]]. By the time of War of the Ring he is majorly depressed, almost insane, and highly incompetent. Finally snapping completely during the siege of Minas Tirith, he tries to immolate himself and his unfavorite son, Faramir, but only succeeds in the first of these.
** '''Boromir''': Elder son of Denthor and a great captain of Gondor (also daddy's favorite). Despite being a great warrior and leader, Boromir ultimately fell to the temptation of the Ring and tried to take it from Frodo. Despite this, he redeemed himself by sacrificing his life to serve as a decoy for Frodo and Sam, and acknowledged Aragorn as his kinsman and king. Somewhat infamous for being one of the only major heroes in the trilogy to die, and the only one of the Fellowship to die (well, him and Gandalf, but the latter got to come back). Remember kids, this ''isn't'' [[A Song of Ice and Fire|that other popular Fantasy series where good guys drop like flies]] (even though Boromir's actor would end up being in and dying in that too!).
** '''Faramir''': Younger son of Denethor and leader of Gondor's Ithilien Rangers. Faramir, while a skilled warrior, he had no love of war and preferred to study and sought council with Gandalf. Denethor disliked Faramir and even told him he would've preferred Faramir to die and Boromir to live. Despite the toxic family environment, Faramir became a worthy steward and passed the rule of Gondor to Aragorn. Like Beren, Tolkien has admitted to basing Faramir off of himself, though also admits that Faramir is more courageous than he.
** '''Prince Imrahil''': Prince of Dol Amroth, who aided in the defense of Minas Tirith and accompanied the Host of the West on the march against the Black Gate. Sadly reduced to a bit role in the movies proper (he isn't even mentioned by name in the films).
* '''Arnorians''': The Dúnedain of the North. They are descendants of the Faithful from Númenor. After the fall of Arnor and its successor kingdoms, the Dúnedain chose to live in hiding rather than rebuild the kingdom, protecting the people from the shadows.
**'''Chieftains of the Dúnedain''':
**''' Aragorn II (Elessar Telcontar)''': Last Chieftain of the northern rangers. He was a member of the Fellowship and contributed to the defeat of Sauron. He later claimed the kingship of Gondor and restored Arnor, as the third High King, and married his Half-Elven kin Arwen. One of the main heroes of the franchise, and all-around badass, especially in the films where he does shit like cleave through Uruk-hai like they're made of twigs, throw torches in Nazgul's faces, and ''parry sword strikes from Olog-hai''. Do not make the mistake of mixing up Movie Aragorn with Book Aragorn. Book Aragorn is more of a stoic, mythical figure similar to King Arthur, who accepts the call to become King of Gondor without any question and is more of a wise, benevolent fighter-King than Movie Aragorn, who is rejecting his destiny at first due to him having severe feelings of inadequacy and far less of a poetry-reciting philosopher.
*'''Black Númenóreans and Corsairs of Umbar''': Descendants of the King's Men from Númenor. The Black Númenóreans who did not directly serve Sauron in Mordor continued their predecessor's ways and held sway over Umbar and Harad as their own colonial possessions. Over time, the Black Númenóreans intermixed with the native population or died out altogether. Some Black Númenóreans were actually renegades from Gondor, who stole large parts of Gondor's fleet during a civil war and became pirates ever since. That Harad's people suffered under their control makes them throwing in with Sauron to get revenge deeply ironic, [[Just As Planned|but that's Sauron for you]].
**'''Mouth of Sauron''': The "not Nazgul" who serves as Sauron's herald and envoy (and implied to serve as a torturer as well). A Black Númenórean of great rank and magical might within Sauron's cult, who's served Sauron for so long, that he forgot his own name and only goes by the aforementioned title Sauron gave him. Puts the "ass" in "ambassador" and in the movies has one of the most dangerously toothpaste-neglected set of chompers in all of fiction. He has lived for a long time, having entered into Sauron's service when "the Dark Tower first rose again", which depending upon interpretation, either makes him an extremely long-lived Black Númenórean if said rising was post-Downfall of Númenor in Second Age 3320, or makes his servitude a much more reasonable 68 years if said rising was Sauron's return in Third Age 2951. Either way, his life was no doubt extended with foul sorcery and dark arts. Despite being a cowardly wuss in the books and getting beheaded mid-sentence without a fight in the films, he's playable in a few video games where he's actually allowed to kick ass for a change.

=== Men of Middle Earth ===
Men not related to the Númenóreans, but who also play significant roles in the world.
*'''Northmen/Men of the North'''
Men who live north of Gondor and west of the sea of Rhûn. This includes the Rohirrim, the Dalish, and the Woodsmen of Rhovanion. The Northmen are distantly related to the men of Gondor, as their ancestors came from the same group as the Edain.
**'''Rohan'''
***'''Eorl the Young''': Founder of Rohan.
***'''Helm Hammerhand''': The Ninth King of Rohan, during a time of protracted war against the Dunlendings as well as great civil strife within Rohan. Said strife came to a head when a rich noble named ''Freca'' with greatly mixed Rohirric and Dunlending ancestry claimed that his family line had a greater claim to the throne and attempted to coerce Helm to marry his daughter to his own son ''Wulf''. After a great many insults and arguments, Helm punched him so hard in the head that Freca was said to have died instantly from the sheer power of that single blow, which gave Helm his byname of '''Hammerhand'''. Helm declared Freca and his kinsmen to be enemies of Rohan, and they fled into Dunland, only to return four years later with a great host of their own led by Freca's son Wulf. Edoras and the Westfold was overrun by the invaders, and Helm and his sons were made to endure a long siege at the then-named Súthburg. By all counts he was an unstoppable warrior, capable of killing scores of Dunlendings with his bare hands and routing their lines with only a blow of his great war-horn. Such was the carnage he single-handedly inflicted that he was likened to a Snow-Troll. Thus was the fortress of Súthburg renamed into ''Helm's Deep'', with the keep where his war-horn was kept renamed to the ''Hornburg''.
****[[Skub|In the Shadow of Mordor continuity, none of the above happens exactly as it did, and instead he is nearly slain; presumably by Freca and his followers. Sauron and Celebrimbor give him a ring of power as he lies dying]], whereupon he becomes an angry, hammer wielding badass with a horned helmet. The corrupting nature of his Ring of Power however drives him to ever greater madness and rage, during one such moment of anger he strikes down his own daughter, and proceeds to kill his rival for the throne and everyone who tries to stop him, which completes his transformation into a Ring-wraith. [[A Song of Ice and Fire|So basically Robert Baratheon]] but a Nazgûl.
***'''Théoden''': King of Rohan. For a time he was possessed by Saruman the White as part of his ploy to conquer Rohan, but was freed by Gandalf. Théoden led Rohan in the successful defense against Isengard and rode to Gondor's aid in the battle of Pelennor Fields. Died in battle, but by all accounts was one hell of a leader (except in the Rankin Bass animated film, where his death sucks utterly).
***'''Théodred''': Son of Théoden. Théodred was killed by Saruman's forces, but Théoden didn't learn of this until after his mind was restored.
***'''Eomer''': Nephew of Theoden and heir to the throne, after Theodred's death. Eomer became King after Théoden died at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
***'''Eowen / Eowyn''': Niece of Théoden and sister of Eomer. Eowen was a shieldmaiden and long desired to win glory in battle, but was often left behind as Théoden feared Rohan would be left leaderless. Eowen developed a crush on Aragorn, but when he refused her claiming she only loved the idea of him, Eowen went to Pelennor Fields in disguise and fought against the Witch-King of Angmar in one of the most badass duels in the whole book series. After the battle she met Faramir and settled down with him, claiming she no longer wished to fight, but to restore what had been destroyed in the war. Much like Princess Leia from Star Wars, one of ''the'' original badass ladies, nerd-crushes, and feminist role models in fiction all rolled into one. The PJ movies make her even ''more'' badass by having her bring down a Mumakil solo and holding her own against an army of Uruk-hai that get into the glittering caves at Helm's Deep in a deleted-but-mentioned-in-reference books scene.
***'''Grima Wormtongue''': Advisor to the king, but in reality a pawn of Saruman. After his treachery was discovered, Grima ran back to Saruman, where he was regularly abused and mistreated by him until Grima finally stabbed Saruman in the back (literally) during their misadventure in the Shire and was shot with arrows for his troubles; in the movies he instead dies at the Orthanc and it's Legolas who kills him. Widely recognized in-universe and out as a slimy prick and complete coward.
**'''Dale'''
***'''Bard the Bowman''': First king of the restored Kingdom of Dale. Bard was an accomplished bowman who could communicate with birds and had a black arrow that always reached its target. This combination helped him to kill Smaug after finding the weak spot on its chest. After the Master of Lake-Town disappeared, he became the new King.
***'''Master of Lake-Town''': An unnamed character who ruled Lake-Town during the events of the Hobbit. He was a greedy SOB who was only interested in his own power and wealth; he abandoned Lake-Town when Smaug attacked, then later ran off with a good chunk of the loot following the Battle of the Five Armies. Died alone and starving to death in the barren wilderness.
*'''The Wildmen of Dunland''': Primitive men who lived in the hills. Unlike the Northmen, the Dunlendings were much more hostile to outsiders, having been enslaved and abused by the conquering Númenóreans of the past. They allied with Saruman as he promised that their original lands would be taken from the Rohirrim and returned to them.
*'''Beornings and Woodsmen''': Named after their progenitor Beorn, a large wild man who could transform into a bear, an ability some of his descendants would share. They lived primarily in the lands between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood. While not overly friendly to outsiders, they were willing to aid the Free Peoples in the fight against Sauron and his minions. They are likely distant relatives of the Rohirrim. The Woodsmen were minor tribes of Edainic men who lived in Mirkwood and were allies of Thranduil and the Beornings. After the War of the Ring with Dol Guldur destroyed, the Beornings and Woodsmen reclaimed Central and Southern Mirkwood (now Greenwood) for themselves.
*'''Woodwoses/Druedain''': A name borrowed from medieval legend; they are wild men who live deep in the forest and remain isolated from the rest of men. They are short and stocky, so some confuse them for Dwarves, but they are definitively of mannish stock. Despte their reclusiveness, the Druedain had been allies of the Edain and their descendants as far back as the First Age, so they appear periodically among the free peoples. The Druedain helped the Rohirrim reach Minas Tirith by way of secret highway through the forest, so they could reinforce the city and avoid an ambushing army. Somewhat like a smaller version of a Sasquatch, or more size-accurate, the Orang-Pendak of Vietnam.
*'''Men of the East''': Commonly referred to as “Easterlings”, and come from the vast lands East of the Sea of Rhun.
**'''Rhun''': Men from the vast and uncharted lands of the East. Rhun is made up of many kingdoms and tribes, most of which are under Sauron’s dominion. However, it should be noted that one of the missions of the Blue Wizards was to raise a resistance in the lands of the East and South; we don’t see them in the stories because they likely were too busy fighting in their homelands.
*'''Men of the South''': collectively referred to as “Southrons” and live south of Gondor and Mordor.
**'''Haradrim of Near Harad/Far Harad''': Tribesmen of the deserts and jungles of Harad. Like the Easterlings they lived under the sway of Sauron, but earlier in their history they also suffered under the dominion of the King’s Men of Numenor (who became the Black Númenóreans and Corsairs of Umbar); this would give them a pre-existing hatred for the descendants of Númenor. Also like the Easterlings, some had allied with the Blue Wizards and refused to fight for Sauron. The Southron's usage of heavy cavalry and scimitars at the battle of the Pelennor Fields suggests a Saracen-like aspect; which together with the inclusion of the tribal and African elements suggested by Sigelhearwan; implies that the Haradrim are organized in an empire-like fashion held together with tribal confederacies.
**'''Men of Khand/Variags of Khand''': Of all the Men under Sauron’s rule we know about Khand the least, other than that they were horsemen who attacked Gondor, it is not even clear as to whether the nomadic horsemen natives and Variags are the same or separate peoples, although the etymology of the word ''Variag'' being derived from the Russian word for ''Varangian'' implies that the Variags are viking-like mercenaries in some fashion, and thus are separate (and possibly even foreign) peoples.

==Elves==
Elves are the first of Ilúvatar’s children (meaning they were created by him alone, without any help from the Valar). They are descended from three main tribes of people, listed below; the Teleri tribe was so large that it separated into several different groups, depending on how far they migrated from the Elves original homeland. Elves are immortal, but suffer from weariness if they remain in Middle Earth for too long, hence why nearly all ended up living in Valinor. Elves' spirits are bound to the world as well; when they die, either they reincarnate in Aman in the Halls of Mandos, or if they reject Mandos, they become disembodied spirits that haunt the land and are vulnerable to corruption by necromancers, especially Sauron. The nature of Elven spirits appears to affect marriages as well, as once they marry they never divorce, cheat or engage in polygamy as their very souls would rebel against the idea (except for that one guy but he was a prick). Elves are also immune to illness, but are more vulnerable to extreme distress, in some cases causing rapid aging or even death. Elves have skills and abilities that seem like magic to mortals, but to the elves it is little different than interacting with the natural world.

=== Vanyar ===
The first and smallest Elvish tribe; they never left The Undying lands to return to Middle Earth except during the battle at the end of the First Age where the Valar finally got sick of Melkor's shit, in which Vanyar forces marched to war for the only time in history, so we know the least about them.
* '''Ingwë:''' The Leader of the Vanyar, went to Aman during the great Elven Migration, stayed in Valinor and thusly became utterly irrelevant for the World's Story, even before the great Migration fully ended.
* '''Ingwion''': The only known son of Ingwë, and even then he is only known for commanding Valar ships that landed in the Middle Earth during the War of Wrath which means he got more done than daddy, though that's not saying much.
* '''Indis''': second wife of Noldor king Finwë, and the mother of all of his children barring Fëanor. She had a bad relationship with her step-son.

=== Noldor ===
The second tribe of Elves. They are great craftsmen and seekers of knowledge. Because if this, they were the only tribe that Morgoth was able to manipulate during his time on Aman, causing half of the Noldor to rebel against the Valar and live in Middle Earth in exile.
* '''Finwë Ñoldóran''' ('''Finu'''): The original leader of the Noldor and their first King. Generally a relaxed dude with the questionable fame of being the first being to be killed in the undying Lands, iced by the Big Bad himself, Melkor.
* '''Curufinwë Fëanáro''' ('''Fëanor'''): Finwë's most incredible son and second King. Unparalleled craftsman, he created the Silmaril, possibly the Palantiri and outstanding weapons as well. After Melkor stole the Silmaril, he unfortunately became a massive hothead and swore vengeance, which doomed all Noldor who went back with him to Middle Earth. Died in one of the earliest battles the Elves had to fight, though it took seven Balrogs to beat him down. He also renamed Melkor to Morgoth. Infamous and in-universe and out as the guy who fucked everything up bad.
* '''Nelyafinwë Maitimo''' ('''Maedhros'''): The (nominal) third King of the Noldor and the eldest son of Fëanor. Sadly, wasn't as badass as his father and was captured by Morgoth before he managed to assume power. He spent several years in captivity before being rescued by his cousin, after which Maedhros did a controversial move and passed the crown to his cousin's father Fingolfin, [[RAGE|which was not approved by his younger brothers]]. After that he was reduced to a minor Elven princedom that hopelessly tried to oppose Morgoth, but at the end he gave into his Oath for the Silmarils, trying to steal one from Beren and Luthien's children; and later stole the other two from the Host of the West. Though he eventually repented and killed himself.
* '''Ñolofinwë Aracáno''' ('''Fingolfin'''): The first High King of the Noldor (in Middle-earth) and one that didn't lose power as fast. Followed his half-brother Fëanor to Middle-earth and founded one of the Noldor kingdoms there. After another battle with Morgoth's forces, he went to the Dark Lords massive Fortress by himself, taunting him, dueling him for hours on end and wounding the Bad Guy seven times before finally falling. What a Chad.
* '''Arafinwë Ingoldo''' ('''Finarfin'''): The other half-brother of Fëanor, and the one that's less important. He set out with his brothers, but turned around and went back to Valinor, becoming the third King of the Noldor. He later commanded the Noldor that had remained at the War of Wrath, along with Ingwion.
* '''Kanafinwë Makalaurë''' ('''Maglor'''): The second son of Fëanor and a great singer, did the same evil shit as his brother Maedhros to get the Silmarils. While his brother sent himself into a hell, Maglor threw Silmaril that Eonwë gave him after Morgoth's defeat into the ocean. It is said he is still wandering the shores of the World regretting every decision he made.
* '''Telperinquar Kurufinwion''' ('''Celebrimbor'''): He ruled over an Elven kingdom of Eregion, which uncharacteristically was situated in the mountains and was a Dwarven ally. He is to blame for the creation of the Rings of Power and other fuckery in the Third Age (although to be fair Sauron deceived him).
** In the Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War games, he attempted to use the Ring against Sauron and was corrupted by it, [[Fail|with the predictable end results]]. Afterwards he became a wraith, who's bonding with Talion allows the latter to fight on after his apparent death, as well as keep coming back every time he's killed and just generally being a superhuman badass. Eventually convinces Talion to forge a ''new'' Ring of power that's intended to be a copy of The One Ring. Tolkien himself made clear that doing this would just result in another Sauron, and indeed Celebrimbor and Talion's plan ends in disaster and tragedy for both of them. Widely considered one of the best parts of the Shadow duology, especially thanks to Alistair McDuncan's god-tier voice acting.
* '''Findekáno Ñolofinwion''' ('''Fingon'''): The second High King of the Noldor. He rescued Maedhros when he had been imprisoned. After inheriting the kingship, he and Maedhros planned to confront Morgoth with everything they had. Unfortunately it wasn't enough and Fingon ended up loosing his his head to Gothmog.
* '''Turukáno Ñolofinwion''' ('''Turgon'''): The third High King of the Noldor and one who got to build Gondolin, where all the cool swords Orcrist, Glamdring and Sting are from. Had very strict views on immigration and even stricter ones on emigration. He died with his wonderful city.
* '''Artafindë Ingoldo''' ('''Finrod'''): Eldest son of Finarfin, king of Nargothrond and one of the big elven cave-dwellers. Helped a Human in his love-quest, which ended up being his demise.
* '''Artaresto Angarátowion''' ('''Orodreth'''): The nephew of Finrod. The resided in Minas Tirith and had become king of Nargothrond, after his uncle's death. He maintained his kingdom in secret from Morgoth and fought him in stealth, until he listened to Túrin. He died in open battle and the realm was destroyed in the process.
* '''Artanis Nerwen''' ('''Galadriel'''): Among the last survivors of the leaders original exiles who didn't leave until after Sauron's death. Never forgave Fëanor for being a creep, and in an insult to him she gave Gimli three strands of her hair after being asked for one, Fëanor having asked for one three times and being rejected each time. Galadriel is arguably the most powerful magic user in Middle Earth by the Third Age (she literally destroys Dol Guldur with a wave of her hand), being one of few elves still alive who came from Valinor and learned magic directly from Melian; however, the two parted ways when Melian learned of the Noldor’s role in the Kinslaying, and Galadriel was unable to return to the Undying Lands until she was finally pardoned after the War of the Ring. Galadriel earned her pardon after resisting the One Ring when Frodo offered it to her; as her original failing was her joining Feanor's rebellion to satisfy her desire to rule her own kingdom, and instead accepting that the Elves’ time in Middle Earth was over. Even before learning magic from Melian, Galadriel had a special talent for knowing the minds and motives of others, which came in handy when Sauron in disguise came to deceive the elves.
* '''Artanáro Artarestowion''' ('''Gil-galad'''): The son of <s>Finrod</s> <s>Fingon</s> Orodreth. Cirdan's best friend, last High King of the Noldor, and the guy who got his face burned by Sauron.
* '''Earendil the Mariner''': The son of Tuor and his wife Idril, father of Elrond and Elros by his wife Elwing. Earendil was a half-elf who lived in the final days of the First Age; after his homeland of Gondolin was destroyed and his people scattered across Beleriand, his own family was nearly destroyed because his wife was in possession of one of the Silmarils and the sons of Feanor wanted it by any means. Earendil and Elwing were forced to flee, eventually sailing to Valinor to beg the Valar to intervene on behalf of elves and men. Earendil and his wife never returned to Middle Earth, but Earendil’s ship was blessed and made to fly, carrying the Silmaril on its prow and became the morning star. Earendil fought in the last battle of the War of Wrath, killing Ancalagon, the greatest of Morgoth’s dragons. As half eleven, Earendil and Elwing were given the choice of the fate of men, or the fate of elves. Earendil would’ve preferred to live as a mortal man, but chose the fate of elves with his wife.
* '''Elrond Half-Elven''': son of Earendil, and head of the House of Elrond. He was born toward the end of the First Age, having been witness to the final atrocities that sank Beleriend beneath the sea. While his brother Elros chose the fate of men and became King of Numenor, Elrond chose the fate of Elves and remained in Middle Earth, serving as herald and loremaster for Gil-Galad. After Gil-Galad's death in the War of the Last Alliance, Elrond took the Noldor elves that remained to Imladris, where they lived in peace and he served as an advisor to the other free peoples. Notably, Elrond did ''not'' take up the title of High King after Gil-Galad's death; while he was of royal lineage, its probable that Elrond didn't see any point since there was hardly a kingdom left to rule, and every single High King had met a grizzly demise beforehand.
* '''Glorfindel''': [[Aenarion|Legendary Elf warrior who died fighting a powerful demonic foe]], only to be resurrected later. Rode against the Nazgul during the Third Age to bring Frodo to Rivendell (Arwen takes over this role in the films, leading to Glorfindel getting cut entirely in one of the bigger changes made in the films).
* '''Arwen Undomiel''': Elrond's daughter and Galadriel's granddaughter (as Elrond's wife was Galadriel's daughter), she is the love of Aragorn's life. As such she decides to stay in Middle-Earth with him even though this ultimately results in her dying alone and unhappy. Barely a character in the books, she's fleshed out heavily in the films (even taking Glorfindel's place for rescuing Frodo).

=== Teleri ===
The third and largest tribe of Elves. After the great migration to Aman, the Teleri mostly refers to the members of the tribe that reached Aman.
* '''Olwë'''
* '''Eärwen'''

=== Sindar ===
Members of the Teleri who reached Beleriand but stayed behind to wait for their king Elu Thingol, who had gone missing (he was in fact entranced at his wife to be). Unlike the rest of the Elves who stayed behind, the Sindar were far more advanced and powerful, because Elu had reached Aman before and taught them what he learned. As a result, Sindarin is the primary elvish dialect in Middle Earth.
* '''Elu Thingol''' ('''Elwë Singollo'''): The only Sinda to have ever seen the light of the Two Trees. He is King of Doriath, along with his wife Melian, and (self-entitled) Lord of Beleriand. Famous for having given Beren the quest of retrieving a Silmaril from Morgoth and for fostering Túrin Turambar. He had been capped by Dwarves, who wanted to keep the Nauglamir, which had the retrieved Silmaril in it, due to a payment dispute.
* '''Eöl Moredhel''' ('''the Dark Elf'''): Easily mistaken for an Avarin Elf of Teleri descent, but is in fact described as a Sinda and Thingol’s kinsman. Eöl was a master craftsman but also one mean SOB. His tribute to Thingol was the cursed black sword Anglachel (later reforged as Gurthang), which always brought misfortune to its owner and was a big part of Turin’s fall. Eöl also kidnapped and forcefully married Turgon’s sister Aredhel when she wandered into his woods, who bore him a son named Maeglin. When Maeglin and his mother fled to Gondolin, Eöl followed them there and demanded the king to return his wife and son. After Turgon denied his demand, Eöl tried to kill Maeglin with a poisoned javelin; but instead killed Aredhel, who flung herself in front of Maeglin. For the murder of the king's sister, Eöl was judged and thrown from the city's walls to his death.
* '''Lúthien Tinúviel''': Thingol's daughter and a stand-in for Tolkien's wife. Part of a power couple with Beren (himself a stand-in for Tolkien). As a beautiful Elf woman with light skin and black hair who marries a mortal man and then dies as a result, she's pretty explicitly the Arwen of her time. Fitting, as she is one of Arwen's ancestors.
* '''Elwing the White''': Granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien, wife of Eärendil, and mother of Elrond and Elros. Elwing inherited the Silmaril from her father Dior, but was forced to flee Doriath when it was destroyed. In the Moths of Sirion the dwealt and married Eärendil. She and her husband both fled Middle Earth entirely when the Sons of Fëanor later came looking for the Silmarils; as her husband had already left by ship to beg the Valar for aid, she jumped into the sea and was transformed into a swan, flying across the sea with the Silmaril to join her husband. Upon arrival in Aman, Elwing convinced her kinsmen, the Falmari, to aid the Hosts of Valinor in freeing Middle Earth (though they still didn’t participate in the war as they still hadn’t forgiven the Noldor for their part in the kinslaying). After the war, she and Eärendil were given the choice of the gift of elves or the gift of men; Elwing chose the gift of elves in honour of her grandmother.
* '''Círdan Ciryatan''' (The Shipwright): Master of Grey Havens and one of the three Elven Ringbearers (although he eventually gave his ring to Gandalf). He is insanely old (to the point that he is the only Tolkien Elf to have a ''beard'') and works as the overseer of Elven migration to Aman. Despite all of previously given information, he is not really relevant and barely appears even in Silmarillion. Sailed to Aman along with the very last Elves in Middle Earth.
* '''Mablung'''
* '''Beleg Cúthalion''': Beleg shared in the accursed fate of Turin, unwittingly causing the betrayal of Mîm due to the memories of the Petty-dwarves being hunted like animals. Beleg died at Turin's hand when he tried to wake Turin up and was struck down by the panicked Turin.
* '''Celeborn''': Galadriel's husband.
* '''Thranduil''': Second (and presumably last) king of Elven Mirkwood and the OG Fantasy Wood Elf ruler. Was bitter that his father died in the war with Sauron and due to that really haven't interfered in the Middle Earth politics before the War of the Ring, although he still helped some Dwarves to get to Erebor.
* '''Legolas''': Son of Thranduil and prince of the Woodland Realm. Legolas was sent as a representative for the Council of Elrond, eventually becoming one of the Fellowship of the Ring. Legolas became close friends with Gimli the dwarf - ironic since both their fathers had bitter enmity due to the events of the Hobbit - with both eventually leaving together for the Undying Lands after the death of Aragorn. One of the most iconic "archer heroes" in all of fiction, especially after the movies came out.

=== Nandor ===
Teleri Elves who diverted at the Misty Mountains during the migration to Aman. The Nandor became the '''Silvan''' Elves, aka Wood Elves, who eventually came under the rule of their Sindar kin.
* '''Haldir''': Marchwarden of Lothlórien, who alongside his brothers stumbled upon the Fellowship as they fled Moria. Unlike his relatives, he actually knew Westron and as such was able to help them reach Galadriel, and a little bit later helped them pack the boats for their journey south.
** In a major departure from the books, the movies had Haldir somehow also lead a troop of Galadhrim Warriors all the way from Lothlórien to Helm's Deep to assist in its defense during the Battle of the Hornburg.
* '''Nimrodel''': An ancient Elf-maid and the tragic lover of the last Lórien King Amroth. She was a bit antisocial and deeply mistrustful of the Noldor and Sindar Elves (with the exception of Amroth, of course), feeling that they brought nothing but war with them; a sentiment that was not factually incorrect, especially in the case of the Noldor. Nimrodel felt the awakening of the Balrog Durin's Bane and tried to flee her homeland, but was found by her boyfriend, who promised her life in Aman. On the road to Edhellond in Belfalas they accidentally separated, with the King boarding the ship and his love getting lost in the White Mountains. After a storm forced the Elves to leave the harbor, Amroth leapt overboard to go back and find her, but drowned. Nimrodel eventually found her way to Edhellond, but the last of the Elves and their ships had already left the ancient city, leaving it abandoned and her alone. Fucking hell.

=== Avari ===
Elves who refused the journey entirely. Mostly irrelevant.

== Dwarves ==
The Dwarves are sometimes referred to as the “Adopted children of Ilúvatar;” their forms were created by Aulë the Smith in his desire to have beings that he could teach his craft to, but because he didn’t possess the Secret Fire, he could not give them true life or free will. Ilúvatar, though disappointed by Aulë acting out of turn, took pity on Aulë’s creation and breathed life into them. However, he also put them to sleep since the elves were preordained to be the first-born children. Because the Dwarves were designed by Aulë and not Illúvatar, they have a few quirks to them compared to the other Children; they're extremely hardy and resistant to corruption, but also very warlike and aggressive, and were prone to pick lots of fights including with other dwarven houses. Also, they tended to suffer from population decline due to a lack of females. It is said that when the Dwarves die, their bodies return to the stone they were made and their souls are gathered to separate chambers within the Halls of Mandos; waiting for the Dagor Dagorath (Last Battle). After the Last Battle, the Dwarves would be hallowed by Eru and ordained to rebuild the world, along with Aulë.
===Dwarves of the First Age===
*'''Durin''' (the Deathless): The eldest of the seven Fathers of the Dwarves. He's founder of the royal House of Durin and is the ruler of the Longbeards. He awoke in Mount Gundabad and travelled southwards, along the Misty Mountains, until he saw a starry crown reflected on a pool upon his head. There he'd founded Khazad-dûm, greatest of the Dwarf mansions, and which would later be known as Moria. He lived for more than two-and-a-half thousand years, hence the title "The Deathless", until the ending years of the 1st Age. Yet even after his death, it's believed that Durin returns from the Halls and incarnates as a new King Durin (presumptively thanks to massive favouritism from Aulë). In later unpublished works, Tolkien may have retconned this instead to where Durin doesn't reincarnate so much as his body regenerates and returns to the world of the living anytime that Durin's Folk is without an heir. Thus Durin restarts the royal line, and that the other Dwarf Fathers have this ability as well.
*'''Telchar''': One of the most famous Dwarf smiths of all, whose craftsmanship could only be matched by Fëanor or equalled by very few on Middle Earth. He's the creator of Narsil, of the knife Angrist which Beren used, and of the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin.
====Petty-Dwarves====
The Petty-Dwarves were a sub-species of Dwarf who were cast out by the other Clans for wicked behavior. They were [[Grimdark|hunted like animals]] during their exile by Elves who weren't aware that other sentient species could exist. When the Elves made contact with other Dwarves, they stopped and left them in peace. By the late 400s of the First Age only three remained, a father and his two sons.
*'''Mîm's Family''': Mîm was the last Petty-Dwarf alongside his sons Ibun and Khîm, who presumably wouldn't be allowed to marry other Dwarves because of their exile, leaving them without potential spouses, and their mother's death sealed their fate. The three lived together in their fathers home in a hill/small mountain, Amon Rûdh and were left alone until, by misfortune, Túrin's gang of anti-Morgoth resistance outlaws happened upon Ibun and Khîm and one of them, Andróg, killed Khîm with a bow during the panic. Túrin repented of his followers mistake and offered their service to Mîm, who accepted and assisted Túrin with resisting Morgoth for a year. Unfortunately, Beleg's arrival pissed Mîm off, understandably so as a genocide victim meeting a warrior of the people who slaughtered all his kin, and arranged to betray the outlaws with an Orc warband, on the condition that they spare Túrin and Ibun and also leave Beleg for Mîm to kill. Andróg, mortally injured, scared Mîm off from the wounded Beleg, then sacrificed himself to repent of his accidental murder and to save Túrin, Beleg and his son Andvír. Ibun either died in the battle, or of some other cause before his father. Mîm then took Nauglamír in the ruins of Nargothrond, and held home and hearth there until 502 of the First Age, whereupon he was killed by Húrin, who saw him as partially responsible for his sons accursed life. Mîm's dying curse on the treasure doomed Doriath and King Thingol and caused the Second Kinslaying. Mîm's death rendered the Petty-Dwarves extinct.

===Dwarves of the Second Age===
*'''Narvi'''
===Dwarves of the Third and Fourth Ages===
Dwarves apparently peacefully went extinct after reclaiming all their lost homes and holds, with the possible exception of Gimli who was allowed into the Undying Lands and may had been given the immortality of an Elf.
*'''Gimli, son of Glóin''': Of the non-royal branch of the house of Durin.
*'''Thrór''': Ruler of Erebor before it was taken by Smaug. After the great exodus of the dwarves, Thror attempted to retake Moria. Thror was killed by Azog, but was avenged by his grandson Thorin.
*'''Thrain II''': Son of Thror. Thrain was imprisoned by the Necromancer of Dol Guldur, later revealed to be Sauron, and had his Ring of Power stolen. He was discovered by Gandalf, and Thrain gave Gandalf the map and key to Erebor, dying shortly after.
*'''Dáin II (Ironfoot)''': Ruler of the Iron Hills; after the death of Thorin Oakenshield, he inherited rule of Erebor. He took an active part in the oft-forgotten northern theatre of the War of the Ring, but was killed at the gates of Erebor by a countless number of Easterlings.
*'''Thorin III (Stonehelm)''': Chronologically, the last known King Under the Mountain before Durin the Last. He rebuilt Erebor and Dale, helped Gimli settle the Glittering Caves in Rohan, and started a new campaign of mining Mithril in Khazad-dûm.
*'''Durin VI''': Famously known for having awakened up the Balrog that laid beep in Moria. Said Balrog slew many-a Dwarves and even Durin was killed. And so the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm were forced out and went on a great exodus.
*'''Durin VII (The Last)''': The last reincarnation of Durin the Deathless, cleared out Moria and fully rebuilt the Dwarf kingdom. The Dwarves are strongly implied to have quietly died out some time after his death.
=====Thorin Oakenshield & Companions=====
*'''Thorin II (Oakenshield)''': Heir of Erebor and leader of the dwarves in exile. Thorin leads the quest for Erebor, eventually succeeding in retaking the kingdom from Smaug. However, he succumbs to dragon-sickness and very nearly goes to war with the Elves, but recovers from his madness long enough to join the battle against the Orcs outside the city gates. Thorin dies in battle.
**'''Balin, son of Fundin''':cousin to Thorin and Dain. Balin served as Thorin's advisor during the Quest for Erebor, and later attempted to retake Moria with a small expeditionary force of Dwarves. Balin's fate was unknown until the Fellowship passed through Moria and discovered his dead body. According to Gloin, he was convinced by "whispers" to retake Moria despite the obvious dangers; its speculated that Sauron or his agents may have been involved as Erebor remained a target of interest after it was retaken."
**'''Glóin, son of Gróin''':
**'''Óin, son of Gróin''':
**'''Fili and Kili''':
**'''Dori, Nori, and Ori''':
**'''Bombur, and cousins Bofur and Bifur''':
=====Other Dwarves=====
*'''[[Chaos Dwarves|Nauglath/Nauglir/Nornwaith]]''': The Wicked Dwarves of the East who had fallen under the Shadow, of which little is known about. Briefly encountered in the First Age by the freshly awoken Men, who could tell that they were of "evil mind" and distrusted them. May have existed in the Third Age as well, where they may have possibly made alliances with Orcs.

==Hobbits==
Hobbits appear to be a sub-species of human. Their origins are left deliberately vague since they were always meant to be an unremarkable people who did not take part in the great tales of the world, instead preferring to keep to themselves and living simple, peaceful lives. See [[Hobbits]] for more details.

* '''Bilbo Baggins''': The protagonist of the original Middle-Earth story. Starts out as a standard Hobbit (likes food and smoking pipes, not ambitious, deathly afraid of adventure, etc.) But Gandalf ropes him into the quest to Erebor, and he becomes the group's "burglar", making him the Ur-example of the "Halfling Thief/Rogue member of an adventuring party". Found the One Ring and managed to "win" it from Gollum by outwitting him in a game of riddles. Though not a fighter himself, his actions were still instrumental in helping the Dwarves reclaim their ancestral home from Smaug and stopping the forces of the Necromancer after. By the time of the War of the Ring, he retires to Rivendell and then accompanies the Elves on their journey to the West. The One Ring is thus inherited by...
** '''Frodo Baggins''' ...Bilbo's nephew. Main hero of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and initially a total nice guy. So nice, in fact, that he's able to resist the One Ring's corrupting influence longer and better than most. This makes him "the Ringbearer", and he is tasked with being the one to take the One Ring to Mordor to destroy it. Sadly, while Frodo means well, he's also as useless in a fight as one would expect a guy who's lived a pastoral existence his whole life to be. This not only requires the other good guys to bodyguard him throughout his adventure, but also results in him being (in order) stabbed by the Witch-King, stabbed by a Troll, stabbed by Shelob's stinger (notice a pattern?), captured by Orcs, and finally getting a finger bitten off by Gollum. Suffice to say, after being Middle-Earth's biggest punching bag for so long, Frodo is so shell-shocked that he realizes he can no longer stay in Middle-Earth, and so after helping to kick Sharkey (AKA Saruman) and his gang out of the Shire, joins his uncle Bilbo in sailing to the West with the Elves, bringing his story to a bittersweet close.
* '''Smeagol / Gollum''': Found the One Ring alongside his brother long after Isildur's death. Sadly, where Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam were all able to resist the One Ring to varying degrees, Smeagol...didn't. Instead, [[Fulgrim|he succumbed to corruption and killed his brother]]. From there, the One Ring morphed him into a "not-Goblin" monster who lived a tormented existence for centuries...until Bilbo swiped the Ring from him. By the time Gollum found the One Ring again, it was now in Frodo's possession, and for a time Gollum agreed to serve Frodo and Sam. Gollum swears his loyalty upon the Ring itself, which Frodo warns him repeatedly that the Ring itself would punish him by casting him into the fire if he ever betrayed Frodo- yes this is foreshadowing, and its probably why it was cut from the films, so as not to basically spoil the ending. Unfortunately, whether because his dark side is just too strong or because of a Faramir-caused misunderstanding (depending on the version of the story), Gollum regresses to evil and betrays Frodo and Sam to Shelob. [[Fail|This does not actually let him get the Ring back though]]. Ultimately meets his end, perhaps fittingly, where his "precious" was first forged; he bites the Ring off of Frodo, but then falls into the lava below shortly after (in the books he falls on his own, in the movies, he's falls over while struggling with Frodo). Widely hailed as one of fiction's great tragic villains, and, since the movies, a veritable fountain of memes.
* '''Samwise "Sam" Gamgee''': If there's a candidate for main hero of the Lord of the Rings besides Frodo himself, it would be Sam, his best bro, gardener, bodyguard, and hypercompetent sidekick all rolled into one. As the guy who sticks with Frodo no matter what Middle-Earth throws at them, resists the One Ring's corruption ''even better than Frodo does'', and able to face down threats many Men would balk at (like Shelob), Sam is acknowledged in-universe and out as the greatest Hobbit to ever live. So in summary, [[Grey Knights|incorruptible, loyal, and better than you]].
* '''Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck''' and '''Peregrin "Pippin" Took''': Frodo's cousins and closest friends besides Sam, and basically the "comic relief duo" of the story, though they do both know how to get serious when needed. Among other things they help get the Ents to join the War of the Ring and kick Saruman's teeth in and partake in many of the big battles of the War of the Ring. Merry helps Eowyn kill the Witch-King (albeit by stabbing him in the back while he'd distracted), and Pippin [[Slayers|''kills a Troll'']]. They also each get to don the attire of one of the great kingdoms of Men (Rohan for Merry and Gondor for Pippin).
* '''Fredeger "Fatty" Bolger''': Frodo's other friend, but never makes an appearance in the movies. Fatty gets a bad rap for not wanting to leave with Frodo and go through the Old Forest, but he still had a part to play in staying behind and convince people that Frodo still lived in the Shire. When the Nazgul arrived, he raised the Horn of Buckland to drive them off, and later aided Frodo in the Scouring of the Shire. On a darker note, after being locked away by the ruffians to starve, no one called him Fatty anymore.
* '''Farmer Maggot''': Local farmer...or so he seems. In fact, he is one of the few Hobbits in the Shire who not only knows about what goes on in the greater world, but actively works in conjunction with Gandalf as needed to ferry and receive information. [[Awesome|So basically a Hobbit Secret Agent]].
* '''The Sackville Baggins''': Proof that even Hobbits can be unlikable assholes, the Sackville-Baggins are relatives of Frodo who neither he nor anyone else particularly like. Basically a couple of obnoxious gold-diggers who Frodo sells the Shire to before heading off on his journey (an action he doesn't enjoy more than anyone else). If there's any nice thing that can be said about them, it's that they ''do'' later assist in the ejection of Sharkey and his goons from the Shire, showing they, like all Hobbits, can be courageous when it matters most. Absent in the movies, but unlike Glorfindel and [[Tom Bombadil|a certain someone]], most aren't likely to mind too much.

==Valar, Maiar, and anything in between==
[[Ainur|Have their own page]].

==Orcs==
'''Orcs/Goblins:''' See [[Orc#Tolkien|Orcs]]. Though not what you see with [[Stormtrooper|Imperial Stormtrooper variants]], they still come in a few varieties:
* '''Snaga''': The Black Speech word for Slave or Servant. This contemptuous term is used amongst the Orcs of Mordor and Isengard to refer to the "lesser" AKA regular Orcs, with the implication that they are only fighting for their master because they are being forced to.
* '''[[Black Orc|Uruks]]:''' A superior breed of Orcs created by Sauron in the middle of the Third Age through either eugenic practices or dark sorcery, most likely both. Uruks are resistant to sunlight (or at least far more able to tolerate it), and are taller and stronger than their lesser kin, though possibly only almost as tall or strong as Men. ''Uruk'' is the Black Speech word for ''Orc'', which opens up a whole mess of questions as to why regular Orcs are not called Uruks while these orcs of superior breeding are, although it could simply be a matter of social hierarchy given the existence and roles of ''Snaga'' within Orc society.
**'''Black Uruks:''' Another name for the Uruks of Mordor who served Sauron. May possibly have been a title only granted to the cream of the crop of Uruks, being those were of the strongest breeding and greatest devotion to Sauron, and were possibly further augmented by being "infused" with Sauron's will or dark sorcerous enchantments.
**'''Uruk-Hai:''' Saruman's take on the above project, with these Orcs being the product of either crossbreeding lesser Orcs with Goblin-Men or crossbreeding Goblin-Men with Men, all with his own sorcery added to the mix. This experiment is said to been even more successful than Sauron's own, with the Orcs produced being as tall and strong as Men and very-resistant/tolerant of sunlight. The etymology of their name has some interesting implications, as said above, ''Uruk'' is Black Speech for Orc, while ''Hai'' is the suffix for "''Folk''"/people, with the result being "Orc-Folk". By calling themselves this, the Uruk-Hai are saying that they are the Orc-People, while all the other Orcs are merely just Orcs and not worthy of being called a people, [[Nazi|which sounds very master-race-like doesn't it?]] In-universe, the other Orcs who interacted with them hate and distrust the Uruk-Hai of Isengard for placing themselves above them and looking down on them, which lends credence to this implication.
* '''Goblin-Men/Half-Orcs''': A hybrid of lesser Orcs and Humans. Look mostly human, albeit rather ugly and "sallow-skinned". Often serve as spies for their full-blooded kin, but most seemed to exist as outlaws and bandits, possibly being the descendants of fully Human criminals and outcasts who shacked up with the Orcs who lived in the Misty Mountains and other isolated areas. Half-Orcs may have been a distinctive breed apart from Goblin-Men, but the differences between the two are never made clear. Very, very minor part of the lore, and you hardly ever see them outside of the books proper.
* '''Mountain Orcs/Goblins:''' Orcs that live in the Misty Mountains and other northern mountain ranges. Largely left to do their own thing, they mug random passersby and launch raids against human settlements. Looked down on by Mordor Orcs and Uruk-Hai as being a bunch of feral tribals, who in turn look down on them for being "slaves to the Shadow" even though they are quick to bend the knee when emissaries from Mordor come calling. Sometimes called Goblins due to linguistic shenanigans, but either way they are the same size and "race" as other normal Orcs, although many extra-canonical works tend to call Mountain Orcs goblins and portray them as being the smallest of the Orc breeds. Less so in the movies and video games based on them, where Goblins are indeed treated as distinct from "regular" Orcs.
* '''Snufflers''': A race of small, darkfurred orcs with big nostrils who were used like humanoid hunting hounds by their larger cousins. May have simply been a mutation or breedable trait rather than an actual sub-race. Never seen or mentioned outside of the books, so they're a concept that didn't catch on with most folks.

Similarly, while they get less attention than the Free Peoples, there are still some named Orc/Uruk-hai characters in the franchise:

* '''Azog the Defiler''': An Orc Chieftain of Moria prior to the events of The Hobbit. He murdered the Dwarven King Thrór, and had the gall to say that he executed him for "trespassing" in Moria. He beheaded Thrór, branded his own name on his forehead in Dwarven Runes, and even dismembered his corpse after insulting Thrór's companion Nár and throwing a small bag of gold coins to him. This event started the ''War of the Dwarves and Orcs'', which ended when Dáin II Ironfoot slew Azog at the Battle of Azanulbizar. Azog was succeeded by his son Bolg.
** The Peter Jackson Hobbit movies had him survive his canon death so as to effectively become the main villain of the trilogy. [[Rage|Most fans were not impressed]].
* '''Bolg''': Bolg, son of Azog, was an Orc Chieftain who led a coalition of Orcs during the time of The Hobbit. Vengeful over his father's death at the hands of the Dwarves, he rallied the Orcs of the Misty Mountains along with the Orcs of Goblin Town at Mount Gundabad, and along with a host of Wargs, marched them to battle at Erebor for the Battle of Five Armies. Bolg was killed in battle by Beorn, who had taken the shape of a bear.
**In the Hobbit Trilogy, Bolg is demoted to a second-in-command due to dad still being alive, and Legolas kills him instead after a battle that [[Wat|involves him defying gravity.]]
* '''Uglúk''': An Uruk-Hai of Isengard who led the company which attacked the Fellowship at Amon Hen and captured Merry and Pippin. After being harried and encircled by Riders of Rohan under Éomer's command, Uglúk and his entire company were slain in battle, with Uglúk being personally killed by Éomer in a sword-fight.
* '''Gothmog''': Only mentioned briefly in Return of the King and no other description given than "Castellan of Minas Morgul", he took command over Mordors force that was still besieging Minas Tirith after the Witch-King was slain. The reason he is listed here is because Peter Jackson made him a heavily scarred Orc in the movie adaptation, the books never mention his race. Some Tolkien Scholars hold the opinion that he was actually one of the Nazgûl.
* '''Grishnákh''': An Orc Captain of Mordor who led his own raiding party of Mordor Orcs in search of the Fellowship. He crossed paths with Uglúk's company in Rohan and tried to intimidate him into turning over Merry and Pippin to his custody, but was unable to do so and lacked the numbers to overtake the individually superior Uruk-Hai. He attempted to depart to the east, but was driven back towards Uglúk's company by the encircling Riders under Éomer, and thus made his last stand together with Uglúk's company near the eaves of the Fangorn Forest.
* '''Gorbag''': A Black Uruk Captain of Mordor who personally served the Nazgûl in Minas Morgul. He; together with Shagrat; found a paralyzed Frodo while on patrol near Cirith Ungol. He was rather observant and wily for an Orc, and was able to deduce that Frodo was not alone in his trespassing and was merely paralyzed by Shelob instead of dead. He attempted to steal Frodo's mithril shirt for himself, but in doing so provokes a fight with Shagrat, which in turn sparks a small insurrection which pitted Gorbag's patrol against Shagrat's garrison. After shanking Shagrat and failing to finish him off with a broken spear, he is killed and trampled by Shagrat. In the movies, it's Shagrat who tries to take the shirt and Gorbag who is loyal to Sauron, and Sam kills him instead.
* '''Shagrat''': A Black Uruk Lieutenant of Mordor who commanded the garrison of the Tower of Cirith Ungol. Shagrat disagreed with Gorbag about what to do with Frodo, and tensions between him and Gorbag's troops sparked a small insurrection. After slaying Gorbag and defeating his underlings, Shagrat took Frodo's mithril shirt and journeyed to Barad-dûr. After delivering the mithril shirt and news of the incident at Cirith Ungol, he was executed by Sauron. In the movie, he's the one who tries to take the shirt for himself, but otherwise presumably dies in the same way.

==[[Dragons]]==
The classic, archetypal dragon. Created by Morgoth in the First Age as his most powerful agents. Sub-Types include:
*'''Cold-drakes''': Lesser Dragons who are unable to breath fire, but they are still a couple tons of muscle and scales and are more numerous than the proper Fire-drake Dragons. Those that remain live in the frozen wasteland of Forodwaith in the desolate north of Middle Earth, although even then they still fuck with the Dwarves who lived in the Grey Mountains, even managing to infest the valley of the Withered Heath.
*'''Sea-serpents''': Also known as Fish-dragons, little is known about this particular breed of dragons except what they were called by, and that Morgoth had also created them. It can be devised that they were either intended to fight Cirdan and the Elven ships in Beleriand; to battle the Host of the West, which would have to cross the ocean; to contest with Ulmo, just as the winged-dragons contested with Manwë and his eagles; or some combination of these possibilities.
*'''Spark-dragons''': Sometimes known as Shock-dragons. Nothing is known about them save for this Elven nomenclature.

As for named Dragons of note:

* '''Glaurung''': The Father of all Dragons, and a [[Nagash| thoroughly sadistic prick]] whose main claim to infamy is hypnotizing and cursing Turin into marrying and knocking up his own sister for sick kicks before his death. He is slain by Turin's cursed sword, Gurthang, but gets the last laugh by revealing Turin's marriage is incestuous with his dying words.

* '''The Fire-drake of Gondolin''': An unnamed Dragon that partook in the Sacking of Gondolin. Big enough to carry ''multiple Balrogs'' on its back. Its physiology and its being unleashed on Gondolin alongside the Balrogs suggests it may have been meant to be Glaurung's replacement, but it too was presumably eventually slain (although its death is never outright shown).

* '''Scatha the Wyrm''': So named for his long, serpentine body, he was a treasure-hoarder like Smaug. Got killed by an ancestor of Eorl the Young named Fram after the local men and Dwarves got sick of him stealing from them.

* '''Gostir''': This dragon is only known by name and was one of Morgoth's dragons. Nothing else is written about him, not even what kind of dragon he was! However, considering that ''Gostir'' is Sindarin for "Terrible Sight", he must have been either one extremely ugly or especially scary-looking dragon. Alternatively, if you interept the "thîr" comprisant component of his Sindarin name to refer not to his face, but instead his expression as per one of the alternative definitions of that word; then Gostir might have been a dragon that had an especially potent hypnotic or mesmerizing stare like that of Glaurung.

* '''Ancalagon the Black''': Morgoth's ultimate Dragon, he saw action during the epic War of Wrath and fell during the battle despite initially [[Awesome|beating back the entire host of the Valar]]. Also one of ''the'' biggest fucking Dragons in all of fiction, as multiple "Dragon size comparisons" on the internet have shown. Seriously, this guy was the size of ''mountains'', and his death destroyed some too when he fell from the sky. How in the heck the good guys were ever able to beat Morgoth with this dude on his side is anyone's guess.

* '''Smaug''': The last, and by far the most famous, of all the Middle-Earth Dragons, he lived into the Third Age where he took over Erebor, slaughtered the Dwarves there, and helped himself to their treasure. He lorded over the mountain and its hoard for many years until a company of Dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield and aided by Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf the Grey finally coaxed him out of his lair, leading to his eventual death when Bard the Bowman shot an arrow that hit him in his one weak-spot. Probably the single most iconic part of The Hobbit, and a highlight of both movie adaptations (yes, even the widely disliked Hobbit trilogy).

==Other Creatures==
'''[[Trolls]]''': Made by Morgoth "in mockery of the Ents", Trolls are giant and stupid creatures often used by the orcs as warbeasts. Like the Orcs themselves, some specially bred Trolls are called "Olog-Hai" and are used as especially dangerous shock troops. Certain breeds, called "stone trolls," will turn to stone when exposed to sunlight.
*'''Olog-Hai''': Sapient trolls who were the troll equivalent of Uruk-Hai.
*'''Half-trolls of Far-Harad''': A possibly mythical race of allegedly half Troll and Men crossbreeds. The confusion is due to them only being referenced a single time within canon at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where the warriors of Far Harad who fought for Sauron were likened to "Half-trolls" and described as being rather large and having "black skin with white eyes and red tongues". May have just been African-type warriors, but the fact that they were described as having "white eyes and red tongues", suggests that they were not actually normal Men, and instead [[Salamanders (Chapter)|Salamander-like]] giants with pitch-black skin and blank, pupil-less white eyes and scarlet red tongues. Alternatively, they COULD have been actually half-man, half-troll, Norwegian myth had that as an explanation for people who were especially ugly hermits or mighty yet ugly warriors. The warrior culture of the Far Harad tribals could view the jungle trolls as virile symbols of barbaric power and Savage Fertility, resulting in zulu-looking men and women boning wild trolls in the jungle, resulting in these bestial half-kin.
*'''Frost Trolls''': A large, shaggy breed of furred trolls native to the far north. Very minor part of the lore, with even more video games and other expanded material not using them.
*'''Ettens''': Another name for Trolls, in the same sense that Goblin is another name for Orcs. Namesake of the Ettenmoors, as Trolls used to infest the region during the time of the Witch-realm of Angmar. "The Etten" was the disguise of an Orc and Troll wearing the same costume to disguise themselves as a massive mutant Troll warlord in the Shadow of War game, so in that version of Middle Earth, Ettens could refer to the more popular pop culture version as two-headed trolls/giants with orcish blood popularized in D&D.

'''[[Treant|Ents]]''': Tree-herders, created by Yavanna to protect the forests. The Ents are extremely old, perhaps the only beings that can rival elves in age. They speak their own unique language that sounds like creaking wood, and are very slow and deliberate in their actions. The Ents are divided into males and females, but by the Third Age, the Entwives have disappeared, leaving the Ent race to eventually vanish.

'''[[Ogres]]''': In-between Orc and Troll in Size, probably mythical and in the same circumstances as the Giants given that they were only mentioned in The Hobbit as well. May also have just been another name for Trolls. Three of them were among Azog's horde in the Hobbit movies during their assault on Laketown, and Games Workshop included models of them for their game.

'''Giants''': Huge humanoids of myth. Only referenced in passing through tales of folklore, but did make an appearance in The Hobbit, where "stone-giants" were described as throwing rocks at each while the Thorin's party attempted to passed through the Misty Mountains. That Giants did not appear or were explicitly referenced after The Hobbit suggests that they were an early idea which was dropped from the greater canon when Tolkien consolidated it with the writing of the main series.

'''[[Werewolves]]''': Fearsome wolves possessed by evil spirits, created as minions of Morgoth in the First Age, but have lingered on throughout the following ages.

'''[[Vampires]]''': Either possibly humanoid bats or just really large sapient and malevolent blood-drinking bats created as minions of Morgoth in the First Age. Very little is known about them. Associated mainly with Sauron, who took the form of one on at least one occasion to escape from Huan, and because the only named Vampire; Thuringwethil; was a servant of Sauron.

'''Nameless Things:''' Things without names, of course. Or much description for that matter. Said by Gandalf to be older than Sauron and live deep beneath the Earth, such that even the Dwarves have never encountered them. Gandalf encountered them in passing while he fought Durin's Bane deep in the tunnels of the Earth after he fell from the bridge of Khazad-Dûm, but even then he refuses to "darken the light of day" with a description of them. Tolkien makes the inference that because these Nameless Things are nameless, that makes them especially dreadful and evil, though they're also largely unconnected with the main conflict that plays out in the story, and exist mostly to add to the world's mystery, as not all dangerous and terrible things are under the Dark Lord's control. They seem rather [[Lovecraft|Lovecraftian]] in their description. Various types of Nameless Things were featured in the Lord of the Rings MMO, including one that was infecting orcs with a parasitic fungus like the Cordyceps strain from The Last of Us to turn them into its own army

'''Mewlips''': Evil, amphibious creatures that prey on travelers in the Long Marshes. Possibly fictitious, or misidentified orcs. Some older LOTR RPG materials described them as some form of ghoul-like aquatic undead. Could also be some sort of subspecies of Orc which overcame their dislike of water to become something akin to [[Koalinth|Koalinths]].

'''Mumakil''': Giant elephant-like creatures from Far Harad, used by the Southrons as warbeasts much in the same way as war elephants of ancient times were used.

'''Great beasts/Great beasts of Gorgoroth''': Large beasts of burden used in Mordor. Not described in any detail at all, except that they were used to pull the battering ram Grond during the Siege of Minas Tirith. Are shown in the game "Gollum" as ornery, rhino-like creatures used as beasts of burden by the Uruks.

'''[[Undead]]''': exist in various forms and are specific in how they come about. The most iconic are the Nazgul, or ring-wraiths. Wraiths are a special class of undead that are apparently created and controlled by Sauron when he enslaves a mortal being to his will, principally through the life-extending rings of power. Magic is used to bind the wraith's invisible flesh to their spirit, and it is only with special magic weapons that they can be killed (or the One Ring is destroyed). Next are ghosts, as seen with the Oathbreakers. Because they have no physical presence, ghosts cannot actually interact with the mortal realm. Normally, human spirits leave Arda altogether upon death, but the Oathbreakers are a special case because of the nature of their curse. Illuvatar doesn't allow their spirits to leave Arda until their oaths are fulfilled. Lastly, you have the Barrow-Wights, which are described as dead bodies inhabited by evil spirits; its suggested that these evil spirits are the souls of dead elves (who didn't go to the Halls of Mandos) that were captured by Sauron and enslaved to his will.

'''Caragors''': Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War exclusive, being basically bigger, nastier Wargs. Devs even said they're to a Warg what a lion is to a wolf.

'''Graugs''': Also a Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War exclusive. Large, ugly giant monsters big enough to literally eat trolls for breakfast, but can be mounted by Talion, at which point he can basically use them like a [[Awesome|fantasy version of King Kong in New York City]]. Their full name is "Olog-Graug", which would indicate they are actually some sort of enormous, feral troll.

'''Creatures of Myth''': These creatures are likely fictional, as they are only referenced in poems, verse, song, or story. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they weren't actually real. Tolkien did like to keep an air of mystery about it.
*'''Were-Wyrms''': Giant Sandworms like something out of Dune or Tremors. Possibly mythical, as they were only referenced offhandedly in The Hobbit, in a line that suggests they are something of a folktale. Showed up in the third Peter Jackson Hobbit movie. Older media portrayed them as a form of wingless, legless dragon.
*'''Turtle-Fish''': Giant Snapping Turtle sea monsters. Pretended to be islands before sinking when prey got off their boats and explored their shell, before consuming the drowning sailors. Mentioned only in verse within The Hobbit.
*'''Glowworms and Great glow-worms''': Bioluminescent worms of myth said to "creep along the Path of Dreams". Only mentioned in early versions of the legendarium.
*'''Badger-Folk''': Upright walking sapient badgers, skepticism is required due to this being told as part of a story by Tom Bombadil.
*'''Lintips''': Small, mousey-smelling creatures from the Moon which rode down to Middle-Earth on a moonbeam. Another tall tale from Tom Bombadil.

==Items of significance==
We're kind of bloating the definition of "character" here, but there are quite a couple of items in Middle-Earth that might as well be characters since Tolkien assigns a great deal of significance to them.

*'''Rings of Power''': The titular magical rings. There are 20 in total: 3 Elven Rings, 7 Dwarfen Rings, 9 Human Rings and the Master Ring. The Rings were created as incredibly powerful magical artifacts by the Elven smith Celebrimbor in Eregion, intended to perserve the world and increase the wisdom and abilities of the wearer. However, this intended purpose was corrupted by Sauron who helped Celebrimbor in the creation of the Dwarfen and Human Rings. Sauron intended the Rings to be conduits through which he could control the races of Middle-Earth via binding them all to his Master Ring. The Elven Rings stand out because they were created last and without Sauron's help and therefore remain untouched by his corruption (their power still hinges on the One Ring, though). Tolkien kept the description of what the Rings actually ''do'' very vague, from what we could gather from the Elven Rings, they probably all intended to fulfill its wearers deepest desires and guide their people to greater wisdom and understanding of the world. The Elven Rings were not used until Sauron was vanquished for the first time in the battle of the Last Alliance. By the time of the third age, their keepers were Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf. Galadriel used the power of her Ring to preserve a vision of Valinor in Lothlorien and keep evil out of the forests (to the point that Orcs literally and figuratively could not enter it), what Elrond and Gandalf did with theirs is left to interpretation. The Dwarfen Rings are implied to be the main source of their legendary riches with the sideeffect that it made them really greedy, awakening the Balrog of Moria and attracting Smaug to Mount Erebor; the Dwarven rings were eventually destroyed or claimed by Sauron. Of the Rings of Men, we know next to nothing, except that their wearers are now the Nazgûl. The Master Ring has the power to dominate the other ringbearers and is strongly implied to be a sentient being of some kind. It radiates a strong allure to anyone who sees it, to the point that people find themselves unable to let it go once they have it (also why Bilbo giving it up is such a testament to his willpower; he was literally the only being in Middle-Earth who had the Ring and gave it up willingly).
*'''Lesser Rings''': created before the Rings of Power by Celebrimbor and his smiths as practice. As the name implies, their powers are significantly more mundane. Gandalf had originally believed that the ring Bilbo found was one of the lesser rings since it was plain and didn't seem to confer many special abilities. Some of them likely were in Sauron's possession and given to his commanders.
*'''Palantiri''': The seeing stones. There were seven in total that Elendil brought over from Numenor when he landed in Middle-Earth. They were perfect spheres made of black stone and rumored to have been created by Feanor himself. The Palantiri were the key to the early dominance of the Dunedain in Middle-Earth; with them, they could keep a watch over large swaths of the world and communicate with their kin in far away lands. Using a Palantir is a daunting and esoteric task that was not well understood even when knowledge of the existence of the stones was relatively common (emphasis on relative, the existence of the Palantiri was one of the closest held secrets of the Dunedain) and as a result, the mileage one could get out of them varied wildly, generally speaking, they responded best to people the stones thought were their rightful owners. Sauron and Saruman famously were frustrated with their inability to utilize their respective Palantirs full potential; for example, Saruman wanted to use the Palantir of Orthanc to search for the ring but found Sauron instead. By the time of the third age, only four of the seven Palantiri were left: The Palantir of Orthanc which was in Sarumans possession and passed onto Gandalf when Grima threw it out of a window. Gandalf took the Palantir with him to Valinor. Sauron held the Palantir of Minas Ithil, stolen when the Nazgûl sieged and destroyed the city and destroyed when Barad-Dûr collapsed as a result of the destruction of the One Ring. Denethor, by the power of his office, held the Palantir of Minas Tirith, where it passed onto Aragorn when he became King. A fourth one sat in a tower on the western edge of Arnor, directed at where Numenor used to be. The other there were over time lost to the passing of time, Gondor lost the Ithil-Stone when the Nazgûl destroyed Minas Ithil. The largest Palantir of them all was located in Osgiliath and was lost when the city burned down during the Kin-Strife. Arnor had three, one in Annuminas and one in Amon Sûl. All three were lost when Arvedui, the last reigning king of Arnor sought refuge from the Witch-King of Angmar in Forodwaith and drowned when a rescue party sent by the elves of Lindon failed to save him; the stones sank together with their owner.

==Apocryphal Characters==
Due to the huge, enduring popularity of Tolkien's writing, many folks over the years have made their own contributions to the lore, effectively giving Tolkien's writings their own "expanded universe". None of these are canon with the books however, and so are listed here instead. Due to how the purists tend to feel about this sort of thing, pretty much all of the characters here are [[Skub]] by default.
===From Movies===
* '''Alfrid''': The Master of Laketown's own personal Wormtongue, and even more obnoxious and hatable. Much as Jar-Jar Binks is often seen as the character who killed the Prequels (or else dragged them down), Alfrid is seen in much the same way regarding the Hobbit movies. Not helped by the fact that he ''gets away with everything'' (unless you watch the extended cut that is).
* '''Lurtz''': Probably one of the most famous "not in the books" characters ever, Lurtz is an Uruk-hai leader made by Saruman in the PJ movies who is in charge of the band sent to Amon Hen. He's the one who personally puts three arrows into Boromir before Aragorn moves in to take him out in a suitably epic one-on-one fight scene. Due to the popularity of the PJ movies, the aforementioned epic fight scene, and the fact that Lurtz isn't ''that'' important of a character, he tends to be a lot more accepted than many other non-canon characters. Lurtz's role in the books likely would have been taken by Uglúk instead, but PJ wanted to have a menacing Orc antagonist in the first film that would be memorable by being the one to kill Boromir and give Aragorn a tough fight, and to represent the unique threat that the Uruk-Hai posed compared to the bog-standard orc.
* '''Sharku''': Leader of Saruman's Warg Riders, which guaranteed him status as a boss battle in a few of the video games. Also used to fake out killing off Aragorn in the second movie before Aragorn returned alive. Looks a lot like Freddy Krueger, and his name is a reference to Saruman's book alias during the Scouring of the Shire, "Sharkey".
* '''Tauriel''': A redheaded Elf waifu played by Evangeline Lily who is crushed on by Legolas and Kili, to [[Rage|the totally chill reactions of most audiences and fans]]. All told she ''is'' reasonably cool, but the general feeling is that making her part of a love triangle that goes nowhere was a dumb idea. Not to mention the "forbidden love" angle had already been done.
* '''Gothmog''': Only apocryphal-ish, since he ''does'' get a mention in Return of the King, being referred by his title "Castellan of Minas Morgul" in two sentences, where he is mentioned taking command of the Orcish warhost that is besieging Minas Tirith after the Witch-King was slain. Other than that, nothing is known about him and he never does get mentioned again, not even in passing. While some Tolkien Scholars hold the opinion that Tolkien was referring to one of the Nazgûl (since Gothmog was the King of the Balrogs, and it seems weird to not assign a name of such a powerful creature to an equally mighty servant of Sauron), Peter Jacksons interpretation of Gothmog was that of a heavily scarred and crippled Orc general that leads the troops on the ground during the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Minas Tirith. A bit ironic is the fact that, while he is clearly intended to be Gothmog, he is actually never mentioned by name in the movie. Also fun fact, he was played the same Maori actor who also played the Witch-King and Lurtz.

===From Video Games===
*'''The Third Age Second Fellowship''': A B-Team Fellowship who are the playable characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Sadly, they're all very, very stock as characters, but at least they got to be the protagonists of one of the better Middle-Earth games.
** '''Berethor''': Gondor Citadel Guard sent by Denethor to find his son Boromir, and also secretly a Manchurian Agent for Saruman and carries another secret in his body. Is fear-proof, and this is actually something that factors into the gameplay.
** '''Idrial''': Discount Arwen, being a female Elf who fights with a falchion and water magic and who falls in love with the heroic man of Gondor (Berethor in this case). Gets a bit green-eyed when Morwen shows up as a result.
** '''Elegost''': A Dunedain Ranger who is the party's token archer character. [[Gotrek & Felix|Is best friends with a Dwarf named Hadhod, who is his travelling companion]].
** '''Hadhod''': Party's token Dwarf, but can do shit Gimli can't (fire and earth magic, namely). [[Gotrek & Felix|Is best friends with a Ranger named Elegost, who is his travelling companion]].
** '''Morwen''': Woman of Rohan [[Rule 34|with a bare midriff]] orphaned when Saruman's forces scour the lands, she joins the party as the closest thing they have to a dedicated thief/rogue. [[Slayers|Fights with dual axes and has a need for vengeance against the enemy]].
** '''Eaoden''': Last member of the party to be recruited, which sadly has the effect of making him even ''more'' lacking in personality than the rest. Also from Rohan, he's one of Theoden's Royal Guards and can actually become a serious powerhouse depending on how you allocate his points.
*'''Battle for Middle-Earth OCs''': Since not every faction in these games has a large number of named folks from the books and films to draw on, EA had to get creative, and so invented some playable hero units whole cloth:
** '''Drogoth the Dragon Lord''': Hero unit for the Goblins, and basically going "fuck that" to the idea of Smaug being the last dragon.
** '''Gorkil the Goblin King''': Goblin with delusions of grandeur who hopes to win Sauron's favor by causing trouble in the North. Rides a giant scorpion into battle.
** '''Hwaldar the Brigand''': A Rhudaur hill chief secretly in league with the Witch-King. Hero unit for the Angmar faction.
** '''Karsh the Whisperer''': Former Captain of Arnor named Carthaen who the Witch-King turns into a wraith to serve as one of his minions instead of his enemies. Hero unit for Angmar.
** '''Morgomir''': Lieutenant of Carn Dûm and a Black Numenorean captain who has become of the Nazgul themselves. Hero unit for Angmar.
** '''Rogash''': The Witch-King's right-hand Troll, being a lot smarter and more dangerous than the standard Olog. Hero unit for Angmar.
*'''Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War Characters''': The cast of Monolith Production's video game duology:
**'''Talion''': Protagonist and pure Badass by way of being a brutal one-man army who can cleave through scores of Uruks, kill Ologs, bring Fire Drakes to heel, and even ''fight and beat Nazgul and Sauron himself''. Looks a lot like Aragorn, but his story goes down a much darker path. Slain along with his wife and son at the start of the game, he is resurrected (sort of), by the spirit of Celebrimbor, turning him into a wraith ''not'' bound to Sauron. From there, he becomes [[Konrad Curze|a ruthless, brutal figure who lives in a world of darkness and evil surrounded on all sides by evildoers he spends his time brutally killing, maiming, and terrorizing]]. Ultimately becomes a cautionary tale about trying to be a Grimdark Anti-Hero in Tolkien's world though; his bearing a new ring of power made by Celebrimbor and using it to bend Uruks and Ologs to his will to build an army in Mordor, makes him all-too similar to the Dark Lord he's fighting against. It culminates in him losing said Ring, taking a discarded Nazgul ring to save himself, and as a result, becoming one of Sauron's nine Nazgul. A lesson in ''not'' fighting Sauron using his methods learned the hard way. In all, most Tolkien purists would consider him way too [[Grimdark]] for J.R.R.'s fiction, and have argued that Tolkien would be horrified by his game's content. But again, given what happens to Talion, it's clear the writers understood the inherent folly in trying to fight Sauron with his own methods. Talion is best seen then as a cautionary tale (and thus a reaffirming of Tolkien's values), not a bastardization ([[Skub|this does not stop people from seeing him and his games as that though)]].
**'''Ioreth and Dirhael''': Talion's wife and son, who, as the wife and son of a tragic Anti-Hero in a [[Grimdark]] story, suffer exactly the fate you expect them to. In Ioreth's case, [[Critical Role|this is not the only time her VA has played a character in a Fantasy series with a sexy faux-British accent who's in love with a brooding, vengeful Anti-Hero]].
**'''The Black Captains''': A trio of Black Numenoreans who act as the main antagonists of the first game. Each represents a different aspect of Sauron's character, and as the folks who murdered Talion's wife and son, are at the top of his shit-list. They are:
***'''Black Hand of Sauron''': Leader of the bunch. [[Tzeentch|Represents the deceitfulness of Sauron]]. Lets his body become a vessel for Sauron so that the latter can temporarily regain his iconic black-armored, physical form.
***'''Hammer of Sauron''': A former Numenorean from the Battle of the Last Alliance [[Angron|who was angry and resentful enough to turn on his fellows]], picking up Sauron's discarded mace and letting it corrupt him (since it seems all of Sauron's stuff does that). [[Khorne|Represents Sauron's physical might and just a generally very angry guy]].
***'''Tower of Sauron''': A tall, scary guy [[Slaanesh|who looks a bit like something out of Hellraiser and accordingly serves as a torturer for Sauron. He represents the horror and viciousness of Sauron]].
**'''Eltariel''': A black-clad Elf who acts as a personal assassin for Galadriel, specially tasked with fighting the Nazgul. Badass enough to keep pace with Talion (and ironically has the same voice actress as his dead wife). Takes the New Ring after Talion loses it and becomes a Nazgul.
**'''Idril''': Gondorian woman who is the daughter of the man in charge of Minas Ithil (which falls much later in the Shadow of Mordor/War continuity). Her daddy betrays the city to the Witch-King on the condition that Idril will be spared, and afterwards Idril leads the surviving Gondorian forces in Mordor. Comments on various collectibles Talion can find scattered throughout Mordor.
** '''Baranor''': A man born in Harad who was given to Gondor as part of a peace exchange and raised by them. Actually did pretty well for himself, becoming a captain in Gondor's army and helping lead the defense of Minas Ithil before it falls. Playable in one of Shadow of War's DLCs, and since he has no Ring of Power, if he dies, its actually Game Over.
**'''Carnan''': An Ent-Wife (or else something like it) and a super-powerful nature spirit who talks weird. Said to be a contemporary of Morgoth, which would make her ''ancient'' if true. Resides in a very forested, scenic part of Mordor that feels more like a part of Lothlorien or Rivendell then anything under Sauron's control, but that is likely owing in part to Carnan's presence. Though mostly a neutral figure unconcerned with the affairs of lesser beings, when a Balrog starts burning her forest down, she joins forces with Talion and Celebrimbor.
**'''Tar-Goroth''': A Balrog awakened by the forging of the New Ring, meaning his rampage is technically Talion and Celebrimbor's fault. There for the sake of having a boss fight with a Balrog.
**'''Zog the Eternal''': An Uruk sorcerer who seeks to summon Tar-Goroth and use him as a living weapon, including against Sauron himself, making him an Uruk with delusions of grandeur. Suffice to say, Talion puts a stop to his plans.
**'''Bruz the Chopper''': An Olog with an Australian accent who is one of Talion's first recruits, but later turns on him when he doesn't get a promotion. Talion responds by mind-raping him, which drives him insane. What happens to him after that is up to the player.
**'''Suladan''': OC Nazgul made for the games, one who funny enough shares a name with one of Games Workshop's original characters from the Lord of the Rings: Strategy Battle Game. Nothing to suggest this is the same character though. His backstory is basically Ar-Pharazon, but a king of the South instead of Numenor, and turned into a Nazgul instead of getting punished by Eru.
**'''Nazgul Sisters (Riya and Yukka)''': Yes, seriously. A pair of twin sisters from an [[Cathay|obscure, rarely seen kingdom of man based off of Asian cultures]] who killed two of Sauron's Nazgul and took their Rings for themselves...which turned them into new Nazgul. Actually try to take power for themselves, but after Eltariel whoops their asses they seem to give up on that idea. Fight with Kusarigama type weapons instead of the usual Morgul Blades.

===From Amazon's Rings of Power===
*'''Arondir''': Black Legolas with a bit of Aragorn / Beren mixed in, or else a male Arwen, since he's doing the whole Elf/Human romance thing, which his fellow Elves point out doesn't end happily for those who do it. Might be Theo's father, but unconfirmed as yet.
*'''Bronwyn''' - Arondir's forbidden human lover (so the Luthien to his Beren, but with the races reversed), who is most notable for [[Derp|somehow commanding humans that escaped Orc invasion despite being a simple farmer (yeah, no signs of any class higher than peasants at all in Southlands)]].
*'''Theo''': Bronwyn's son that currently has super cool dark weapon on his hands, which seems to be a Morgul Blade, leading to fan theories that he'll turn into a Nazgul. Notably, we never get a good look at his ears, suggesting he might be Arondir's kid (which would fit given that he's his mom's boyfriend).
*'''[[Sauron|Halbrand]]''': Mysterious human that joins Galadriel in her quest. Has a lot in common with Aragorn (such as being the successor to a kingdom long vanished), but was ultimately revealed to be a certain ''other'' canon character. Given all of the hints beforehand, namely his silver tongue, talent for manipulation, the fact that he's trying to rule the Southlands (aka Mordor), his asking Adar (who claimed to kill Sauron), if he recognized him, and keen interest and skill in blacksmithing, (to the point that he claimed no one knew the craft better than him and was able to help Celebrimbor make the Rings of Power), this identity reveal didn't come as a shock to anybody when it came...except Galadriel. Speaking of, he got the hots for her during the time they spent together, and attempted to convince her to join him, but it didn't take (obviously). At the end of the season, he does what none should be able to do...[[Meme|he simply walked into Mordor]].
*'''Adar''': Elvish for "father", he's [[Malekith|a corrupted but charismatic black armored Elf]] (according to himself, he's a "first-generation orc", with visible scar on his head where Morgoth poured his evil... corruption juice... thing) who leads a band of Orcs hoping to do...something. Might be Maedhros (since he's got a gauntlet over one hand, and Maedhros burned one of his hands grabbing a Silmaril). Played by Benjen Stark's actor, meaning both of the Stark brother's actors have now been in Middle-Earth adaptations.
*'''Eärien''': Elendil's daughter and an architect-in-training, and that's pretty much it so far. She opposes intervention into the Middle Earth and Pharazôn's son has the hots for her. While the showrunners decided to include her for "female energy," she does very little to actually drive the plot, apart from convince Kemen to burn some ships in order to stop the Numenoreans from leaving because... reasons?
*'''Kemen''': Pharazon's son (presumably from a woman other than Tar-Miriel, since Pharazon hasn't married her yet). Has the hots for Elendil's daughter.
*'''Nori Brandyfoot''' - <s>Hobbit</s>Harfoot girl, since we can't have a Tolkien adaptation without Hobbits. Like Frodo and Bilbo pretty clearly meant to be an audience surrogate, but a lot more eager for adventure at the outset than the latter. Probably won't be carrying anyone's ring around, but you never know. Currently palling around with a mysterious stranger who might actually be Gandalf, furthering the Frodo/Bilbo parallels. No relation to the Dwarf of Thorin's company despite the name.
*'''Poppy Proudfellow''': Sam to Nori's Frodo, basically. Not much else to say.
*'''Sadoc Burrows''': Elder of the Harfoot tribe. There was some initial controversy over his casting, with some people even making the point that [[derp|how did the isolated hobbits change from multi-ethnic to lilY-white after a few centuries?]] (Though Tolkien does describe the Harfoots as darker skinned than other Hobbit types). His character became even more [[skub]] when it was discovered that in spite of the Harfoot's claims that "nobody gets left behind" and "harfoots have hearts as big as their feet," they very regularly abandon other tribe members to death and even outright sabotage their wagons if the tribe gets fed up with them. So yeah, people think of harfoots as sociopaths now. In Sadoc's case though, its suggested that his having to leave behind his own wife and child hardened him into his current state. Dies after getting knifed by the Morgoth cult, even though Meteor Man should be able to heal him.
*'''Disa''': Durin's wife. [[/pol/|Her being black got the predictable reaction]], but she's actually more canon-friendly than many of the other characters in the show due to the fact that her name is listed in the appendices (though many people still complained WHERE'S HER BEARD???). Helps convince her husband to cut Elrond some slack for not seeing him in 20 years. Disa is also some sort of priestess for Khazad-Dum, apparently singing to the mountain to free dwarves trapped in a cave-in. For a moment people joked that maybe ''she'' was Sauron when she suddenly morphed from cheery housewife to political schemer reminiscent of Darth Sidious himself (albeit a much less evil one).
*'''<s>Meteor Man</s> <s>Encino Man</s> The Stranger''': Mysterious old man who crash-landed in Harfoot territory, and was befriended by Nori. He can't speak the common tongue and appears to be very proficient in magic, while also not understanding basic concepts like death. Most figure he's Gandalf or maybe Radagast, but other theories abound (everything from his being Sauron to being a Blue Wizard, [[Wat|to being a Balrog]]). He's confirmed in the Season 1 finale to be an Istari, with ''HEAVY'' implications that he's Gandalf, but he likely will only be referred to by one of his lesser-known names like Olorin. So ultimately, [[Superman|he's a human-looking being of great power who crash-lands from another world and is taken in by kind-hearted rural people. Sound familiar?]]
*'''<s>Feminem</s> <s>Slim Lady</s> The Priestess Trio''': Trio of white-clad ladies, led by a buzzcut woman who gives the most dramatic stink-eye. Names are The Dweller, the Nomad, and the Ascetic. Lots of people thought she was Sauron from the trailer until they realized the character had boobs (and Amazon outright said it wasn't Sauron). Honestly we know basically nothing about her and her two pals since their first appearance in the show is only slightly longer than the trailer, but apparently they're tracking Meteor Man and seem to be part of a leftover Morgoth cult. Despite having magic on par with a wizard and shapeshifting abilities, and also being incredibly pale, they're ultimately revealed to be Easterlings from Rhun, with a strong implication that they will either become Nazgul or are some precursor to it (although it does also seem that the Stranger blows them up at the end, so they might just be dead). The leader has a crown in the spirit world, which brings to mind the Witch-King of Angmar. Bear in mind, the Rings of Power are what turn humans into Nazgul, and they don't get created until the very end of the season, so they probably ''aren't'' Nazgul. Barrow-Wights maybe?

Middle Earth characters

2023-03-10T02:36:07Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* From Movies */

Much like [[Star Wars|a certain other popular franchise that is the bread and butter of nerds everywhere]], describing even the cursory information is a massive job. But hey, that's what we're here for. Below you'll find a guide to the many beings who call Middle Earth home. For a guide to the places in Middle-Earth and the location itself, [[Middle Earth|see here]].

==Humans==
The second-born of [[God|Eru Ilúvatar’s]] children. Humans are split across many tribes and nations throughout Middle Earth. Unlike the immortal Elves, who are tied to the world and reincarnate in Aman if they die, the souls of men leave the world altogether to parts unknown by all save Ilúvatar himself. Men are also a mystery to everyone else in Middle Earth and are given "strange gifts," for they alone are able to shape their fates beyond the Music of the Ainur. It's noted that while Men are more corruptible to evil than the Elves and were the most similar to Morgoth in nature, Morgoth still greatly feared Men, including those who served him, since they were such an anomaly in Arda. Nevertheless, most [[Warriors of Chaos|of evil's footsoldiers in the franchise who aren't Orcs/Goblins/Uruk-hai are corrupted humans]]. Their capacity for corruption has, in fact, given the race of Man something of a mixed reputation among Elves, who sometimes regard them as weak. Luckily, there's always an Aragorn or Faramir just waiting to prove them wrong.

=== Edain of the First Age and Outlaws ===
The Edain were the first three tribes to arrive in Beleriand and make contact with the elves. The Edain and their descendants were staunch allies of the elves and the forces of good, despite taking terrible losses during the first age. It should also be noted that, while the elves were always superior to men in beauty, craft and wisdom, the Elves and Edain were equals in strength and endurance, and an Edain could be mistaken for an elf from long distance.
* '''Beren Erchamion''' (the Renowned in Sindarin) - Member of House of Bëor and the protagonist of "Beren and Lúthien" story. Is notable for [[Awesome|stealing a gem from the crown of Evil Satan guy]] and marrying an Elven woman (the first time in the Legendarium). Beren’s ring of Barahir becomes the only relic of the Numenorean Royal family that survives into the Third Age, used to mark Aragorn’s royal lineage. Based off of Tolkien himself, which is a ''bit'' self-indulgent on his part, but most would say the man earned it.
* '''Hurin Thalion:'''(the Steadfast) - One of mankind’s bravest warriors and a close ally of Turgon of Gondolin. He and his men fought to allow Turgon to escape Morgoth, with Hurin being the sole survivor. [[Grimdark|Morgoth tortured Hurin for the location of Gondolin, but Hurin refused to betray them, so Morgoth cursed Hurin’s children and for Hurin to witness their doom from afar]].
* '''Turin Turambar''' (Master of Doom) - Member of House of Hador, son of Hurin, known to be '''THE''' Kullervo expy way before [[Elric]]. Went from great hero to [[meme|An Hero]] thanks to Morgoth placing a curse over his family. It is said that he will finally get his revenge against Morgoth in the Dagor Dagorath (Middle-Earth's Ragnarok), by being the one to finally killing him.
* '''Tuor Eladar''' (the Blessed) - Cousin of Turin and a great human hero during the war with Morgoth, chosen by the vala Ulmo to find Gondolin and warn its inhabitants that the city will fall. In spite of Turgon's reluctance to leave he was able to convince the city's population to listen. Also married an elf princess and is the grandfather of Elrond. His symbol is the Swan, a motif kept by his human descendants.
* '''The Gaurwaith''': The Gaurwaith were a band of outlaws who Turin came to be in control of. They died in the battle at Amon Rûdh after Mîm's betrayal (see Mîm's section for the cause and details). Androg, the one indirectly responsible for the betrayal through an accidental murder, sacrificed himself to save Turin, Beleg and his own son Andvir. After Beleg was accidentally killed by Turin and Turin's suicide, Andvir was the last survivor. He related the portions of Turin's tale relevant to him to the poet Dirhaval, whose account of Turin's life make the primary source of the story of Hurin's family.
===== Followers of Melkor in the First Age =====
*'''Ulfang the Black''': Chief of one of two Easterling tribes that migrated westwards and became friends with Elves. [[Erebus|Unlike his fellow chieftain Bór the Faithful however, he was a traitor serving Morgoth all along.]] [[Horus Heresy|And yeah, his sons and tribesmen basically gave the Dark Lord the second biggest army in his service (after Orcs, of course).]]

=== Númenóreans ===
The Edain were rewarded by the Valar after the first age with their own island nation and extended lifespan; by 25 their aging slows down dramatically and can live for potentially hundreds of years, though they also have the ability to die willingly; some do before senility and infirmity sets in, but later Númenórians held on to their lives as long as possible out of fear of death. The Númenórian empire grew powerful, establishing many settlements across Middle Earth during the Second Age. However, Númenor was destroyed following a split between its people, as explained below.
*'''Pre-Schism Edain''':
** '''Elros''', or '''Tar-Minyatur''' as a King (Kings of Númenor always took an Elven Regnal name, and when that stopped -see below- it meant the end of the human golden age), was the first ruler of Númenor and Elrond's brother who chose a human fate (but still got around 500 years to live). He is also an ancestor of Aragorn.
** '''Tar-Minastir''': the eleventh king who ruled during the War of the Elves and Sauron; Minastir sent an army to aid the elves, but because Numenor had no standing army at the time, it took weeks to prepare an army and they arrived too late to save Eregion. Tar-Minastir's rule marks the beginning of Numenor's shift, as now they had a taste for war and an envy of the elves, and started permanent settlements in the mainland. But things wouldn't fully go south until the rule of his grandson Tar-Atanamir, as seen below.
*'''The King's Men''' - the majority faction in Númenor. With the support of the royal house, they were an Imperialist, faithless (later satanic), human-supremacist faction that opposed the Valar and desired power, wealth, and immortality. They would fall to Sauron's lies, and become the Black Númenóreans after Númenor's destruction.
** '''Tar-Atanamir''' - Founder of the King's Men faction and thirteenth king of Númenor. Atanamir openly opposed the Valar and Elves and coveted their immortality. Because men were forbidden to sail west, he sent his men east to start colonies in Middle Earth and subjugate the people living there, extracting its wealth for his kingdom, though he didn't have the balls to stop using an Elven name, the arrogant egomaniacs that followed him dropped that.
** '''Ar-Pharazôn the Golden''' - Last king of Númenor. Ar-Pharazôn usurped the throne from its rightful queen, his cousin Tar-Miriel, by [[Rape|a ''very'' forced marriage]]. Ar-Pharazôn defeated Sauron in open combat and brought him back to Númenor as a hostage to prove his might; this however turned out to be a trap, as [[Erebus|Sauron manipulated Pharazôn and the King's Men into believing that by worshipping Morgoth and making human sacrifices to him, they'd be able to challenge the Valar and take immortality for themselves, leading to Numenor's ruin]]. [[Fail|The moment Ar-Pharazôn and his men set foot on Aman, however, his armies became trapped beneath the Earth, Aman was permanently separated from the rest of the world, and Númenor sank beneath the seas as divine punishment]].
*'''The Faithful''' - the minority faction who still retained their devotion to Eru Ilúvatar and respect for the Valar and Elves. The Faithful became more oppressed over time by the King's Men.
**'''Tar-Palantir''' - The final Faithful king and second-to-last king of Númenor. Tar-Palantir tried his best to reverse the damage brought on by his predecessors, but it was too little too late, and much of Númenor's population opposed his policies. Tar-Palantir prophesied that the line of kings would end if the White Tree was felled; this came partially true, as the kings of Númenor ended with Ar-Pharazôn after he sacrificed the White Tree to Sauron, but a sapling of the tree was saved and the line of kings continued through the line of Elendil.
** '''Tar-Miriel''' - The daughter of King Tar-Palantir, and the last rightful heir of Númenor. Ar-Pharazôn was like "fuck that, I want to be in charge" and married her to get the power [[Rape|against her will]]. Sadly dies when Númenor goes under. Actually gets to be in charge in [[Skub|Rings of Power]] as Queen-Regent [[Wat|while her daddy's locked up as a prisoner in his own kingdom.]] Blinded later on, which in conjunction with her foresight gives her an "Oracle of Delphi" feel.
**'''Amandil''' - The last Lord of Andúnië, which is a cadet branch of the Royal line and had been the centre of the Faithful presence in Númenor; though once Amandil had been close friends with Ar-Pharazôn, the lordship had later been revoked, thanks to the cunning of Sauron. When Amandil had learned of Ar-Pharazôn's plans of invading Aman, he with three other servants travelled to the West to warn the Valar and have mercy upon Númenor. Though, just in case that plan didn't work, he also warned his son and grandchildren to flee the island with as many of the Faithful as they could find. Nothing more is known of Amandil's fate. Just as likely he could have died instantly as he stepped into Valinor, as he could have been welcomed by the Valar and become immortal, like Tuor.
**'''Elendil''' - Son of Amandil, Elendil and his family did their best to preserve their ancestor's traditions, including saving a fruit of the White Tree of Kings (Nimloth) before it was destroyed. They organised the evacuation fleet to Middle Earth during the fall of Númenor, where they settled new Kingdoms in Gondor and Arnor. As the new High King, Tar-Elendil lead the Men of the West during the War of the Last Alliance, where he fell in combat against Sauron.

=== Gondorians, Arnorians and Black Númenóreans ===
Gondor and Arnor were kingdoms established by the Faithful after the fall of Númenor. Though Arnor in the North fell to Angmar, Gondor lasted through the entire Third Age and well into the fourth, becoming the ''Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor'' (since the heir to Arnor's throne, Aragorn, inherited Gondor's, what with his original kingdom being gone and all).
* '''Isildur''' - second High King of both Gondor and Arnor. Finally defeated Sauron in the War of Last Alliance, but became a victim of One Ring's power and tragically died in an Orc ambush, leaving the Ring without a host for a while. Body was never found. Becomes a Nazgul in the Shadow of Mordor/War continuity, until Talion frees his spirit from Sauron's control...and then later takes his ring and his place as one of the Nine.
* '''Anarion'''- Isildur's brother, died before their father Elendil during the early months of the War of the Last Alliance.
* '''Gondorians''': The Dúnedain of the South. They are descendants of the Faithful from Númenor.
** '''Denethor II''' - Ruling Steward of Gondor at the beginning of the books. He originally was a great and capable ruler whose sanity was damaged by usage of the Anor-stone Palantir, as instead of helping in espionage against Sauron it showed [[Grimdark|the death of everyone and the triumph of evil]]. By the time of War of the Ring he is majorly depressed, almost insane, and highly incompetent. Finally snapping completely during the siege of Minas Tirith, he tries to immolate himself and his unfavorite son, Faramir, but only succeeds in the first of these.
** '''Boromir''': Elder son of Denthor and a great captain of Gondor (also daddy's favorite). Despite being a great warrior and leader, Boromir ultimately fell to the temptation of the Ring and tried to take it from Frodo. Despite this, he redeemed himself by sacrificing his life to serve as a decoy for Frodo and Sam, and acknowledged Aragorn as his kinsman and king. Somewhat infamous for being one of the only major heroes in the trilogy to die, and the only one of the Fellowship to die (well, him and Gandalf, but the latter got to come back). Remember kids, this ''isn't'' [[A Song of Ice and Fire|that other popular Fantasy series where good guys drop like flies]] (even though Boromir's actor would end up being in and dying in that too!).
** '''Faramir''': Younger son of Denethor and leader of Gondor's Ithilien Rangers. Faramir, while a skilled warrior, he had no love of war and preferred to study and sought council with Gandalf. Denethor disliked Faramir and even told him he would've preferred Faramir to die and Boromir to live. Despite the toxic family environment, Faramir became a worthy steward and passed the rule of Gondor to Aragorn. Like Beren, Tolkien has admitted to basing Faramir off of himself, though also admits that Faramir is more courageous than he.
** '''Prince Imrahil''': Prince of Dol Amroth, who aided in the defense of Minas Tirith and accompanied the Host of the West on the march against the Black Gate. Sadly reduced to a bit role in the movies proper (he isn't even mentioned by name in the films).
* '''Arnorians''': The Dúnedain of the North. They are descendants of the Faithful from Númenor. After the fall of Arnor and its successor kingdoms, the Dúnedain chose to live in hiding rather than rebuild the kingdom, protecting the people from the shadows.
**'''Chieftains of the Dúnedain''':
**''' Aragorn II (Elessar Telcontar)''': Last Chieftain of the northern rangers. He was a member of the Fellowship and contributed to the defeat of Sauron. He later claimed the kingship of Gondor and restored Arnor, as the third High King, and married his Half-Elven kin Arwen. One of the main heroes of the franchise, and all-around badass, especially in the films where he does shit like cleave through Uruk-hai like they're made of twigs, throw torches in Nazgul's faces, and ''parry sword strikes from Olog-hai''.
*'''Black Númenóreans and Corsairs of Umbar''': Descendants of the King's Men from Númenor. The Black Númenóreans who did not directly serve Sauron in Mordor continued their predecessor's ways and held sway over Umbar and Harad as their own colonial possessions. Over time, the Black Númenóreans intermixed with the native population or died out altogether. Some Black Númenóreans were actually renegades from Gondor, who stole large parts of Gondor's fleet during a civil war and became pirates ever since. That Harad's people suffered under their control makes them throwing in with Sauron to get revenge deeply ironic, [[Just As Planned|but that's Sauron for you]].
**'''Mouth of Sauron''': The "not Nazgul" who serves as Sauron's herald and envoy (and implied to serve as a torturer as well). A Black Númenórean of great rank and magical might within Sauron's cult, who's served Sauron for so long, that he forgot his own name and only goes by the aforementioned title Sauron gave him. Puts the "ass" in "ambassador" and in the movies has one of the most dangerously toothpaste-neglected set of chompers in all of fiction. He has lived for a long time, having entered into Sauron's service when "the Dark Tower first rose again", which depending upon interpretation, either makes him an extremely long-lived Black Númenórean if said rising was post-Downfall of Númenor in Second Age 3320, or makes his servitude a much more reasonable 68 years if said rising was Sauron's return in Third Age 2951. Either way, his life was no doubt extended with foul sorcery and dark arts. Despite being a cowardly wuss in the books and getting beheaded mid-sentence without a fight in the films, he's playable in a few video games where he's actually allowed to kick ass for a change.

=== Men of Middle Earth ===
Men not related to the Númenóreans, but who also play significant roles in the world.
*'''Northmen/Men of the North'''
Men who live north of Gondor and west of the sea of Rhûn. This includes the Rohirrim, the Dalish, and the Woodsmen of Rhovanion. The Northmen are distantly related to the men of Gondor, as their ancestors came from the same group as the Edain.
**'''Rohan'''
***'''Eorl the Young''': Founder of Rohan.
***'''Helm Hammerhand''': The Ninth King of Rohan, during a time of protracted war against the Dunlendings as well as great civil strife within Rohan. Said strife came to a head when a rich noble named ''Freca'' with greatly mixed Rohirric and Dunlending ancestry claimed that his family line had a greater claim to the throne and attempted to coerce Helm to marry his daughter to his own son ''Wulf''. After a great many insults and arguments, Helm punched him so hard in the head that Freca was said to have died instantly from the sheer power of that single blow, which gave Helm his byname of '''Hammerhand'''. Helm declared Freca and his kinsmen to be enemies of Rohan, and they fled into Dunland, only to return four years later with a great host of their own led by Freca's son Wulf. Edoras and the Westfold was overrun by the invaders, and Helm and his sons were made to endure a long siege at the then-named Súthburg. By all counts he was an unstoppable warrior, capable of killing scores of Dunlendings with his bare hands and routing their lines with only a blow of his great war-horn. Such was the carnage he single-handedly inflicted that he was likened to a Snow-Troll. Thus was the fortress of Súthburg renamed into ''Helm's Deep'', with the keep where his war-horn was kept renamed to the ''Hornburg''.
****[[Skub|In the Shadow of Mordor continuity, none of the above happens exactly as it did, and instead he is nearly slain; presumably by Freca and his followers. Sauron and Celebrimbor give him a ring of power as he lies dying]], whereupon he becomes an angry, hammer wielding badass with a horned helmet. The corrupting nature of his Ring of Power however drives him to ever greater madness and rage, during one such moment of anger he strikes down his own daughter, and proceeds to kill his rival for the throne and everyone who tries to stop him, which completes his transformation into a Ring-wraith. [[A Song of Ice and Fire|So basically Robert Baratheon]] but a Nazgûl.
***'''Théoden''': King of Rohan. For a time he was possessed by Saruman the White as part of his ploy to conquer Rohan, but was freed by Gandalf. Théoden led Rohan in the successful defense against Isengard and rode to Gondor's aid in the battle of Pelennor Fields. Died in battle, but by all accounts was one hell of a leader (except in the Rankin Bass animated film, where his death sucks utterly).
***'''Théodred''': Son of Théoden. Théodred was killed by Saruman's forces, but Théoden didn't learn of this until after his mind was restored.
***'''Eomer''': Nephew of Theoden and heir to the throne, after Theodred's death. Eomer became King after Théoden died at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
***'''Eowen / Eowyn''': Niece of Théoden and sister of Eomer. Eowen was a shieldmaiden and long desired to win glory in battle, but was often left behind as Théoden feared Rohan would be left leaderless. Eowen developed a crush on Aragorn, but when he refused her claiming she only loved the idea of him, Eowen went to Pelennor Fields in disguise and fought against the Witch-King of Angmar in one of the most badass duels in the whole book series. After the battle she met Faramir and settled down with him, claiming she no longer wished to fight, but to restore what had been destroyed in the war. Much like Princess Leia from Star Wars, one of ''the'' original badass ladies, nerd-crushes, and feminist role models in fiction all rolled into one. The PJ movies make her even ''more'' badass by having her bring down a Mumakil solo and holding her own against an army of Uruk-hai that get into the glittering caves at Helm's Deep in a deleted-but-mentioned-in-reference books scene.
***'''Grima Wormtongue''': Advisor to the king, but in reality a pawn of Saruman. After his treachery was discovered, Grima ran back to Saruman, where he was regularly abused and mistreated by him until Grima finally stabbed Saruman in the back (literally) during their misadventure in the Shire and was shot with arrows for his troubles; in the movies he instead dies at the Orthanc and it's Legolas who kills him. Widely recognized in-universe and out as a slimy prick and complete coward.
**'''Dale'''
***'''Bard the Bowman''': First king of the restored Kingdom of Dale. Bard was an accomplished bowman who could communicate with birds and had a black arrow that always reached its target. This combination helped him to kill Smaug after finding the weak spot on its chest. After the Master of Lake-Town disappeared, he became the new King.
***'''Master of Lake-Town''': An unnamed character who ruled Lake-Town during the events of the Hobbit. He was a greedy SOB who was only interested in his own power and wealth; he abandoned Lake-Town when Smaug attacked, then later ran off with a good chunk of the loot following the Battle of the Five Armies. Died alone and starving to death in the barren wilderness.
*'''The Wildmen of Dunland''': Primitive men who lived in the hills. Unlike the Northmen, the Dunlendings were much more hostile to outsiders, having been enslaved and abused by the conquering Númenóreans of the past. They allied with Saruman as he promised that their original lands would be taken from the Rohirrim and returned to them.
*'''Beornings and Woodsmen''': Named after their progenitor Beorn, a large wild man who could transform into a bear, an ability some of his descendants would share. They lived primarily in the lands between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood. While not overly friendly to outsiders, they were willing to aid the Free Peoples in the fight against Sauron and his minions. They are likely distant relatives of the Rohirrim. The Woodsmen were minor tribes of Edainic men who lived in Mirkwood and were allies of Thranduil and the Beornings. After the War of the Ring with Dol Guldur destroyed, the Beornings and Woodsmen reclaimed Central and Southern Mirkwood (now Greenwood) for themselves.
*'''Woodwoses/Druedain''': A name borrowed from medieval legend; they are wild men who live deep in the forest and remain isolated from the rest of men. They are short and stocky, so some confuse them for Dwarves, but they are definitively of mannish stock. Despte their reclusiveness, the Druedain had been allies of the Edain and their descendants as far back as the First Age, so they appear periodically among the free peoples. The Druedain helped the Rohirrim reach Minas Tirith by way of secret highway through the forest, so they could reinforce the city and avoid an ambushing army. Somewhat like a smaller version of a Sasquatch, or more size-accurate, the Orang-Pendak of Vietnam.
*'''Men of the East''': Commonly referred to as “Easterlings”, and come from the vast lands East of the Sea of Rhun.
**'''Rhun''': Men from the vast and uncharted lands of the East. Rhun is made up of many kingdoms and tribes, most of which are under Sauron’s dominion. However, it should be noted that one of the missions of the Blue Wizards was to raise a resistance in the lands of the East and South; we don’t see them in the stories because they likely were too busy fighting in their homelands.
*'''Men of the South''': collectively referred to as “Southrons” and live south of Gondor and Mordor.
**'''Haradrim of Near Harad/Far Harad''': Tribesmen of the deserts and jungles of Harad. Like the Easterlings they lived under the sway of Sauron, but earlier in their history they also suffered under the dominion of the King’s Men of Numenor (who became the Black Númenóreans and Corsairs of Umbar); this would give them a pre-existing hatred for the descendants of Númenor. Also like the Easterlings, some had allied with the Blue Wizards and refused to fight for Sauron. The Southron's usage of heavy cavalry and scimitars at the battle of the Pelennor Fields suggests a Saracen-like aspect; which together with the inclusion of the tribal and African elements suggested by Sigelhearwan; implies that the Haradrim are organized in an empire-like fashion held together with tribal confederacies.
**'''Men of Khand/Variags of Khand''': Of all the Men under Sauron’s rule we know about Khand the least, other than that they were horsemen who attacked Gondor, it is not even clear as to whether the nomadic horsemen natives and Variags are the same or separate peoples, although the etymology of the word ''Variag'' being derived from the Russian word for ''Varangian'' implies that the Variags are viking-like mercenaries in some fashion, and thus are separate (and possibly even foreign) peoples.

==Elves==
Elves are the first of Ilúvatar’s children (meaning they were created by him alone, without any help from the Valar). They are descended from three main tribes of people, listed below; the Teleri tribe was so large that it separated into several different groups, depending on how far they migrated from the Elves original homeland. Elves are immortal, but suffer from weariness if they remain in Middle Earth for too long, hence why nearly all ended up living in Valinor. Elves' spirits are bound to the world as well; when they die, either they reincarnate in Aman in the Halls of Mandos, or if they reject Mandos, they become disembodied spirits that haunt the land and are vulnerable to corruption by necromancers, especially Sauron. The nature of Elven spirits appears to affect marriages as well, as once they marry they never divorce, cheat or engage in polygamy as their very souls would rebel against the idea (except for that one guy but he was a prick). Elves are also immune to illness, but are more vulnerable to extreme distress, in some cases causing rapid aging or even death. Elves have skills and abilities that seem like magic to mortals, but to the elves it is little different than interacting with the natural world.

=== Vanyar ===
The first and smallest Elvish tribe; they never left The Undying lands to return to Middle Earth except during the battle at the end of the First Age where the Valar finally got sick of Melkor's shit, in which Vanyar forces marched to war for the only time in history, so we know the least about them.
* '''Ingwë:''' The Leader of the Vanyar, went to Aman during the great Elven Migration, stayed in Valinor and thusly became utterly irrelevant for the World's Story, even before the great Migration fully ended.
* '''Ingwion''': The only known son of Ingwë, and even then he is only known for commanding Valar ships that landed in the Middle Earth during the War of Wrath which means he got more done than daddy, though that's not saying much.
* '''Indis''': second wife of Noldor king Finwë, and the mother of all of his children barring Fëanor. She had a bad relationship with her step-son.

=== Noldor ===
The second tribe of Elves. They are great craftsmen and seekers of knowledge. Because if this, they were the only tribe that Morgoth was able to manipulate during his time on Aman, causing half of the Noldor to rebel against the Valar and live in Middle Earth in exile.
* '''Finwë Ñoldóran''' ('''Finu'''): The original leader of the Noldor and their first King. Generally a relaxed dude with the questionable fame of being the first being to be killed in the undying Lands, iced by the Big Bad himself, Melkor.
* '''Curufinwë Fëanáro''' ('''Fëanor'''): Finwë's most incredible son and second King. Unparalleled craftsman, he created the Silmaril, possibly the Palantiri and outstanding weapons as well. After Melkor stole the Silmaril, he unfortunately became a massive hothead and swore vengeance, which doomed all Noldor who went back with him to Middle Earth. Died in one of the earliest battles the Elves had to fight, though it took seven Balrogs to beat him down. He also renamed Melkor to Morgoth. Infamous and in-universe and out as the guy who fucked everything up bad.
* '''Nelyafinwë Maitimo''' ('''Maedhros'''): The (nominal) third King of the Noldor and the eldest son of Fëanor. Sadly, wasn't as badass as his father and was captured by Morgoth before he managed to assume power. He spent several years in captivity before being rescued by his cousin, after which Maedhros did a controversial move and passed the crown to his cousin's father Fingolfin, [[RAGE|which was not approved by his younger brothers]]. After that he was reduced to a minor Elven princedom that hopelessly tried to oppose Morgoth, but at the end he gave into his Oath for the Silmarils, trying to steal one from Beren and Luthien's children; and later stole the other two from the Host of the West. Though he eventually repented and killed himself.
* '''Ñolofinwë Aracáno''' ('''Fingolfin'''): The first High King of the Noldor (in Middle-earth) and one that didn't lose power as fast. Followed his half-brother Fëanor to Middle-earth and founded one of the Noldor kingdoms there. After another battle with Morgoth's forces, he went to the Dark Lords massive Fortress by himself, taunting him, dueling him for hours on end and wounding the Bad Guy seven times before finally falling. What a Chad.
* '''Arafinwë Ingoldo''' ('''Finarfin'''): The other half-brother of Fëanor, and the one that's less important. He set out with his brothers, but turned around and went back to Valinor, becoming the third King of the Noldor. He later commanded the Noldor that had remained at the War of Wrath, along with Ingwion.
* '''Kanafinwë Makalaurë''' ('''Maglor'''): The second son of Fëanor and a great singer, did the same evil shit as his brother Maedhros to get the Silmarils. While his brother sent himself into a hell, Maglor threw Silmaril that Eonwë gave him after Morgoth's defeat into the ocean. It is said he is still wandering the shores of the World regretting every decision he made.
* '''Telperinquar Kurufinwion''' ('''Celebrimbor'''): He ruled over an Elven kingdom of Eregion, which uncharacteristically was situated in the mountains and was a Dwarven ally. He is to blame for the creation of the Rings of Power and other fuckery in the Third Age (although to be fair Sauron deceived him).
** In the Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War games, he attempted to use the Ring against Sauron and was corrupted by it, [[Fail|with the predictable end results]]. Afterwards he became a wraith, who's bonding with Talion allows the latter to fight on after his apparent death, as well as keep coming back every time he's killed and just generally being a superhuman badass. Eventually convinces Talion to forge a ''new'' Ring of power that's intended to be a copy of The One Ring. Tolkien himself made clear that doing this would just result in another Sauron, and indeed Celebrimbor and Talion's plan ends in disaster and tragedy for both of them. Widely considered one of the best parts of the Shadow duology, especially thanks to Alistair McDuncan's god-tier voice acting.
* '''Findekáno Ñolofinwion''' ('''Fingon'''): The second High King of the Noldor. He rescued Maedhros when he had been imprisoned. After inheriting the kingship, he and Maedhros planned to confront Morgoth with everything they had. Unfortunately it wasn't enough and Fingon ended up loosing his his head to Gothmog.
* '''Turukáno Ñolofinwion''' ('''Turgon'''): The third High King of the Noldor and one who got to build Gondolin, where all the cool swords Orcrist, Glamdring and Sting are from. Had very strict views on immigration and even stricter ones on emigration. He died with his wonderful city.
* '''Artafindë Ingoldo''' ('''Finrod'''): Eldest son of Finarfin, king of Nargothrond and one of the big elven cave-dwellers. Helped a Human in his love-quest, which ended up being his demise.
* '''Artaresto Angarátowion''' ('''Orodreth'''): The nephew of Finrod. The resided in Minas Tirith and had become king of Nargothrond, after his uncle's death. He maintained his kingdom in secret from Morgoth and fought him in stealth, until he listened to Túrin. He died in open battle and the realm was destroyed in the process.
* '''Artanis Nerwen''' ('''Galadriel'''): Among the last survivors of the leaders original exiles who didn't leave until after Sauron's death. Never forgave Fëanor for being a creep, and in an insult to him she gave Gimli three strands of her hair after being asked for one, Fëanor having asked for one three times and being rejected each time. Galadriel is arguably the most powerful magic user in Middle Earth by the Third Age (she literally destroys Dol Guldur with a wave of her hand), being one of few elves still alive who came from Valinor and learned magic directly from Melian; however, the two parted ways when Melian learned of the Noldor’s role in the Kinslaying, and Galadriel was unable to return to the Undying Lands until she was finally pardoned after the War of the Ring. Galadriel earned her pardon after resisting the One Ring when Frodo offered it to her; as her original failing was her joining Feanor's rebellion to satisfy her desire to rule her own kingdom, and instead accepting that the Elves’ time in Middle Earth was over. Even before learning magic from Melian, Galadriel had a special talent for knowing the minds and motives of others, which came in handy when Sauron in disguise came to deceive the elves.
* '''Artanáro Artarestowion''' ('''Gil-galad'''): The son of <s>Finrod</s> <s>Fingon</s> Orodreth. Cirdan's best friend, last High King of the Noldor, and the guy who got his face burned by Sauron.
* '''Earendil the Mariner''': The son of Tuor and his wife Idril, father of Elrond and Elros by his wife Elwing. Earendil was a half-elf who lived in the final days of the First Age; after his homeland of Gondolin was destroyed and his people scattered across Beleriand, his own family was nearly destroyed because his wife was in possession of one of the Silmarils and the sons of Feanor wanted it by any means. Earendil and Elwing were forced to flee, eventually sailing to Valinor to beg the Valar to intervene on behalf of elves and men. Earendil and his wife never returned to Middle Earth, but Earendil’s ship was blessed and made to fly, carrying the Silmaril on its prow and became the morning star. Earendil fought in the last battle of the War of Wrath, killing Ancalagon, the greatest of Morgoth’s dragons. As half eleven, Earendil and Elwing were given the choice of the fate of men, or the fate of elves. Earendil would’ve preferred to live as a mortal man, but chose the fate of elves with his wife.
* '''Elrond Half-Elven''': son of Earendil, and head of the House of Elrond. He was born toward the end of the First Age, having been witness to the final atrocities that sank Beleriend beneath the sea. While his brother Elros chose the fate of men and became King of Numenor, Elrond chose the fate of Elves and remained in Middle Earth, serving as herald and loremaster for Gil-Galad. After Gil-Galad's death in the War of the Last Alliance, Elrond took the Noldor elves that remained to Imladris, where they lived in peace and he served as an advisor to the other free peoples. Notably, Elrond did ''not'' take up the title of High King after Gil-Galad's death; while he was of royal lineage, its probable that Elrond didn't see any point since there was hardly a kingdom left to rule, and every single High King had met a grizzly demise beforehand.
* '''Glorfindel''': [[Aenarion|Legendary Elf warrior who died fighting a powerful demonic foe]], only to be resurrected later. Rode against the Nazgul during the Third Age to bring Frodo to Rivendell (Arwen takes over this role in the films, leading to Glorfindel getting cut entirely in one of the bigger changes made in the films).
* '''Arwen Undomiel''': Elrond's daughter and Galadriel's granddaughter (as Elrond's wife was Galadriel's daughter), she is the love of Aragorn's life. As such she decides to stay in Middle-Earth with him even though this ultimately results in her dying alone and unhappy. Barely a character in the books, she's fleshed out heavily in the films (even taking Glorfindel's place for rescuing Frodo).

=== Teleri ===
The third and largest tribe of Elves. After the great migration to Aman, the Teleri mostly refers to the members of the tribe that reached Aman.
* '''Olwë'''
* '''Eärwen'''

=== Sindar ===
Members of the Teleri who reached Beleriand but stayed behind to wait for their king Elu Thingol, who had gone missing (he was in fact entranced at his wife to be). Unlike the rest of the Elves who stayed behind, the Sindar were far more advanced and powerful, because Elu had reached Aman before and taught them what he learned. As a result, Sindarin is the primary elvish dialect in Middle Earth.
* '''Elu Thingol''' ('''Elwë Singollo'''): The only Sinda to have ever seen the light of the Two Trees. He is King of Doriath, along with his wife Melian, and (self-entitled) Lord of Beleriand. Famous for having given Beren the quest of retrieving a Silmaril from Morgoth and for fostering Túrin Turambar. He had been capped by Dwarves, who wanted to keep the Nauglamir, which had the retrieved Silmaril in it, due to a payment dispute.
* '''Eöl Moredhel''' ('''the Dark Elf'''): Easily mistaken for an Avarin Elf of Teleri descent, but is in fact described as a Sinda and Thingol’s kinsman. Eöl was a master craftsman but also one mean SOB. His tribute to Thingol was the cursed black sword Anglachel (later reforged as Gurthang), which always brought misfortune to its owner and was a big part of Turin’s fall. Eöl also kidnapped and forcefully married Turgon’s sister Aredhel when she wandered into his woods, who bore him a son named Maeglin. When Maeglin and his mother fled to Gondolin, Eöl followed them there and demanded the king to return his wife and son. After Turgon denied his demand, Eöl tried to kill Maeglin with a poisoned javelin; but instead killed Aredhel, who flung herself in front of Maeglin. For the murder of the king's sister, Eöl was judged and thrown from the city's walls to his death.
* '''Lúthien Tinúviel''': Thingol's daughter and a stand-in for Tolkien's wife. Part of a power couple with Beren (himself a stand-in for Tolkien). As a beautiful Elf woman with light skin and black hair who marries a mortal man and then dies as a result, she's pretty explicitly the Arwen of her time. Fitting, as she is one of Arwen's ancestors.
* '''Elwing the White''': Granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien, wife of Eärendil, and mother of Elrond and Elros. Elwing inherited the Silmaril from her father Dior, but was forced to flee Doriath when it was destroyed. In the Moths of Sirion the dwealt and married Eärendil. She and her husband both fled Middle Earth entirely when the Sons of Fëanor later came looking for the Silmarils; as her husband had already left by ship to beg the Valar for aid, she jumped into the sea and was transformed into a swan, flying across the sea with the Silmaril to join her husband. Upon arrival in Aman, Elwing convinced her kinsmen, the Falmari, to aid the Hosts of Valinor in freeing Middle Earth (though they still didn’t participate in the war as they still hadn’t forgiven the Noldor for their part in the kinslaying). After the war, she and Eärendil were given the choice of the gift of elves or the gift of men; Elwing chose the gift of elves in honour of her grandmother.
* '''Círdan Ciryatan''' (The Shipwright): Master of Grey Havens and one of the three Elven Ringbearers (although he eventually gave his ring to Gandalf). He is insanely old (to the point that he is the only Tolkien Elf to have a ''beard'') and works as the overseer of Elven migration to Aman. Despite all of previously given information, he is not really relevant and barely appears even in Silmarillion. Sailed to Aman along with the very last Elves in Middle Earth.
* '''Mablung'''
* '''Beleg Cúthalion''': Beleg shared in the accursed fate of Turin, unwittingly causing the betrayal of Mîm due to the memories of the Petty-dwarves being hunted like animals. Beleg died at Turin's hand when he tried to wake Turin up and was struck down by the panicked Turin.
* '''Celeborn''': Galadriel's husband.
* '''Thranduil''': Second (and presumably last) king of Elven Mirkwood and the OG Fantasy Wood Elf ruler. Was bitter that his father died in the war with Sauron and due to that really haven't interfered in the Middle Earth politics before the War of the Ring, although he still helped some Dwarves to get to Erebor.
* '''Legolas''': Son of Thranduil and prince of the Woodland Realm. Legolas was sent as a representative for the Council of Elrond, eventually becoming one of the Fellowship of the Ring. Legolas became close friends with Gimli the dwarf - ironic since both their fathers had bitter enmity due to the events of the Hobbit - with both eventually leaving together for the Undying Lands after the death of Aragorn. One of the most iconic "archer heroes" in all of fiction, especially after the movies came out.

=== Nandor ===
Teleri Elves who diverted at the Misty Mountains during the migration to Aman. The Nandor became the '''Silvan''' Elves, aka Wood Elves, who eventually came under the rule of their Sindar kin.
* '''Haldir''': Marchwarden of Lothlórien, who alongside his brothers stumbled upon the Fellowship as they fled Moria. Unlike his relatives, he actually knew Westron and as such was able to help them reach Galadriel, and a little bit later helped them pack the boats for their journey south.
** In a major departure from the books, the movies had Haldir somehow also lead a troop of Galadhrim Warriors all the way from Lothlórien to Helm's Deep to assist in its defense during the Battle of the Hornburg.
* '''Nimrodel''': An ancient Elf-maid and the tragic lover of the last Lórien King Amroth. She was a bit antisocial and deeply mistrustful of the Noldor and Sindar Elves (with the exception of Amroth, of course), feeling that they brought nothing but war with them; a sentiment that was not factually incorrect, especially in the case of the Noldor. Nimrodel felt the awakening of the Balrog Durin's Bane and tried to flee her homeland, but was found by her boyfriend, who promised her life in Aman. On the road to Edhellond in Belfalas they accidentally separated, with the King boarding the ship and his love getting lost in the White Mountains. After a storm forced the Elves to leave the harbor, Amroth leapt overboard to go back and find her, but drowned. Nimrodel eventually found her way to Edhellond, but the last of the Elves and their ships had already left the ancient city, leaving it abandoned and her alone. Fucking hell.

=== Avari ===
Elves who refused the journey entirely. Mostly irrelevant.

== Dwarves ==
The Dwarves are sometimes referred to as the “Adopted children of Ilúvatar;” their forms were created by Aulë the Smith in his desire to have beings that he could teach his craft to, but because he didn’t possess the Secret Fire, he could not give them true life or free will. Ilúvatar, though disappointed by Aulë acting out of turn, took pity on Aulë’s creation and breathed life into them. However, he also put them to sleep since the elves were preordained to be the first-born children. Because the Dwarves were designed by Aulë and not Illúvatar, they have a few quirks to them compared to the other Children; they're extremely hardy and resistant to corruption, but also very warlike and aggressive, and were prone to pick lots of fights including with other dwarven houses. Also, they tended to suffer from population decline due to a lack of females. It is said that when the Dwarves die, their bodies return to the stone they were made and their souls are gathered to separate chambers within the Halls of Mandos; waiting for the Dagor Dagorath (Last Battle). After the Last Battle, the Dwarves would be hallowed by Eru and ordained to rebuild the world, along with Aulë.
===Dwarves of the First Age===
*'''Durin''' (the Deathless): The eldest of the seven Fathers of the Dwarves. He's founder of the royal House of Durin and is the ruler of the Longbeards. He awoke in Mount Gundabad and travelled southwards, along the Misty Mountains, until he saw a starry crown reflected on a pool upon his head. There he'd founded Khazad-dûm, greatest of the Dwarf mansions, and which would later be known as Moria. He lived for more than two-and-a-half thousand years, hence the title "The Deathless", until the ending years of the 1st Age. Yet even after his death, it's believed that Durin returns from the Halls and incarnates as a new King Durin (presumptively thanks to massive favouritism from Aulë). In later unpublished works, Tolkien may have retconned this instead to where Durin doesn't reincarnate so much as his body regenerates and returns to the world of the living anytime that Durin's Folk is without an heir. Thus Durin restarts the royal line, and that the other Dwarf Fathers have this ability as well.
*'''Telchar''': One of the most famous Dwarf smiths of all, whose craftsmanship could only be matched by Fëanor or equalled by very few on Middle Earth. He's the creator of Narsil, of the knife Angrist which Beren used, and of the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin.
====Petty-Dwarves====
The Petty-Dwarves were a sub-species of Dwarf who were cast out by the other Clans for wicked behavior. They were [[Grimdark|hunted like animals]] during their exile by Elves who weren't aware that other sentient species could exist. When the Elves made contact with other Dwarves, they stopped and left them in peace. By the late 400s of the First Age only three remained, a father and his two sons.
*'''Mîm's Family''': Mîm was the last Petty-Dwarf alongside his sons Ibun and Khîm, who presumably wouldn't be allowed to marry other Dwarves because of their exile, leaving them without potential spouses, and their mother's death sealed their fate. The three lived together in their fathers home in a hill/small mountain, Amon Rûdh and were left alone until, by misfortune, Túrin's gang of anti-Morgoth resistance outlaws happened upon Ibun and Khîm and one of them, Andróg, killed Khîm with a bow during the panic. Túrin repented of his followers mistake and offered their service to Mîm, who accepted and assisted Túrin with resisting Morgoth for a year. Unfortunately, Beleg's arrival pissed Mîm off, understandably so as a genocide victim meeting a warrior of the people who slaughtered all his kin, and arranged to betray the outlaws with an Orc warband, on the condition that they spare Túrin and Ibun and also leave Beleg for Mîm to kill. Andróg, mortally injured, scared Mîm off from the wounded Beleg, then sacrificed himself to repent of his accidental murder and to save Túrin, Beleg and his son Andvír. Ibun either died in the battle, or of some other cause before his father. Mîm then took Nauglamír in the ruins of Nargothrond, and held home and hearth there until 502 of the First Age, whereupon he was killed by Húrin, who saw him as partially responsible for his sons accursed life. Mîm's dying curse on the treasure doomed Doriath and King Thingol and caused the Second Kinslaying. Mîm's death rendered the Petty-Dwarves extinct.

===Dwarves of the Second Age===
*'''Narvi'''
===Dwarves of the Third and Fourth Ages===
Dwarves apparently peacefully went extinct after reclaiming all their lost homes and holds, with the possible exception of Gimli who was allowed into the Undying Lands and may had been given the immortality of an Elf.
*'''Gimli, son of Glóin''': Of the non-royal branch of the house of Durin.
*'''Thrór''': Ruler of Erebor before it was taken by Smaug. After the great exodus of the dwarves, Thror attempted to retake Moria. Thror was killed by Azog, but was avenged by his grandson Thorin.
*'''Thrain II''': Son of Thror. Thrain was imprisoned by the Necromancer of Dol Guldur, later revealed to be Sauron, and had his Ring of Power stolen. He was discovered by Gandalf, and Thrain gave Gandalf the map and key to Erebor, dying shortly after.
*'''Dáin II (Ironfoot)''': Ruler of the Iron Hills; after the death of Thorin Oakenshield, he inherited rule of Erebor. He took an active part in the oft-forgotten northern theatre of the War of the Ring, but was killed at the gates of Erebor by a countless number of Easterlings.
*'''Thorin III (Stonehelm)''': Chronologically, the last known King Under the Mountain before Durin the Last. He rebuilt Erebor and Dale, helped Gimli settle the Glittering Caves in Rohan, and started a new campaign of mining Mithril in Khazad-dûm.
*'''Durin VI''': Famously known for having awakened up the Balrog that laid beep in Moria. Said Balrog slew many-a Dwarves and even Durin was killed. And so the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm were forced out and went on a great exodus.
*'''Durin VII (The Last)''': The last reincarnation of Durin the Deathless, cleared out Moria and fully rebuilt the Dwarf kingdom. The Dwarves are strongly implied to have quietly died out some time after his death.
=====Thorin Oakenshield & Companions=====
*'''Thorin II (Oakenshield)''': Heir of Erebor and leader of the dwarves in exile. Thorin leads the quest for Erebor, eventually succeeding in retaking the kingdom from Smaug. However, he succumbs to dragon-sickness and very nearly goes to war with the Elves, but recovers from his madness long enough to join the battle against the Orcs outside the city gates. Thorin dies in battle.
**'''Balin, son of Fundin''':cousin to Thorin and Dain. Balin served as Thorin's advisor during the Quest for Erebor, and later attempted to retake Moria with a small expeditionary force of Dwarves. Balin's fate was unknown until the Fellowship passed through Moria and discovered his dead body. According to Gloin, he was convinced by "whispers" to retake Moria despite the obvious dangers; its speculated that Sauron or his agents may have been involved as Erebor remained a target of interest after it was retaken."
**'''Glóin, son of Gróin''':
**'''Óin, son of Gróin''':
**'''Fili and Kili''':
**'''Dori, Nori, and Ori''':
**'''Bombur, and cousins Bofur and Bifur''':
=====Other Dwarves=====
*'''[[Chaos Dwarves|Nauglath/Nauglir/Nornwaith]]''': The Wicked Dwarves of the East who had fallen under the Shadow, of which little is known about. Briefly encountered in the First Age by the freshly awoken Men, who could tell that they were of "evil mind" and distrusted them. May have existed in the Third Age as well, where they may have possibly made alliances with Orcs.

==Hobbits==
Hobbits appear to be a sub-species of human. Their origins are left deliberately vague since they were always meant to be an unremarkable people who did not take part in the great tales of the world, instead preferring to keep to themselves and living simple, peaceful lives. See [[Hobbits]] for more details.

* '''Bilbo Baggins''': The protagonist of the original Middle-Earth story. Starts out as a standard Hobbit (likes food and smoking pipes, not ambitious, deathly afraid of adventure, etc.) But Gandalf ropes him into the quest to Erebor, and he becomes the group's "burglar", making him the Ur-example of the "Halfling Thief/Rogue member of an adventuring party". Found the One Ring and managed to "win" it from Gollum by outwitting him in a game of riddles. Though not a fighter himself, his actions were still instrumental in helping the Dwarves reclaim their ancestral home from Smaug and stopping the forces of the Necromancer after. By the time of the War of the Ring, he retires to Rivendell and then accompanies the Elves on their journey to the West. The One Ring is thus inherited by...
** '''Frodo Baggins''' ...Bilbo's nephew. Main hero of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and initially a total nice guy. So nice, in fact, that he's able to resist the One Ring's corrupting influence longer and better than most. This makes him "the Ringbearer", and he is tasked with being the one to take the One Ring to Mordor to destroy it. Sadly, while Frodo means well, he's also as useless in a fight as one would expect a guy who's lived a pastoral existence his whole life to be. This not only requires the other good guys to bodyguard him throughout his adventure, but also results in him being (in order) stabbed by the Witch-King, stabbed by a Troll, stabbed by Shelob's stinger (notice a pattern?), captured by Orcs, and finally getting a finger bitten off by Gollum. Suffice to say, after being Middle-Earth's biggest punching bag for so long, Frodo is so shell-shocked that he realizes he can no longer stay in Middle-Earth, and so after helping to kick Sharkey (AKA Saruman) and his gang out of the Shire, joins his uncle Bilbo in sailing to the West with the Elves, bringing his story to a bittersweet close.
* '''Smeagol / Gollum''': Found the One Ring alongside his brother long after Isildur's death. Sadly, where Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam were all able to resist the One Ring to varying degrees, Smeagol...didn't. Instead, [[Fulgrim|he succumbed to corruption and killed his brother]]. From there, the One Ring morphed him into a "not-Goblin" monster who lived a tormented existence for centuries...until Bilbo swiped the Ring from him. By the time Gollum found the One Ring again, it was now in Frodo's possession, and for a time Gollum agreed to serve Frodo and Sam. Gollum swears his loyalty upon the Ring itself, which Frodo warns him repeatedly that the Ring itself would punish him by casting him into the fire if he ever betrayed Frodo- yes this is foreshadowing, and its probably why it was cut from the films, so as not to basically spoil the ending. Unfortunately, whether because his dark side is just too strong or because of a Faramir-caused misunderstanding (depending on the version of the story), Gollum regresses to evil and betrays Frodo and Sam to Shelob. [[Fail|This does not actually let him get the Ring back though]]. Ultimately meets his end, perhaps fittingly, where his "precious" was first forged; he bites the Ring off of Frodo, but then falls into the lava below shortly after (in the books he falls on his own, in the movies, he's falls over while struggling with Frodo). Widely hailed as one of fiction's great tragic villains, and, since the movies, a veritable fountain of memes.
* '''Samwise "Sam" Gamgee''': If there's a candidate for main hero of the Lord of the Rings besides Frodo himself, it would be Sam, his best bro, gardener, bodyguard, and hypercompetent sidekick all rolled into one. As the guy who sticks with Frodo no matter what Middle-Earth throws at them, resists the One Ring's corruption ''even better than Frodo does'', and able to face down threats many Men would balk at (like Shelob), Sam is acknowledged in-universe and out as the greatest Hobbit to ever live. So in summary, [[Grey Knights|incorruptible, loyal, and better than you]].
* '''Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck''' and '''Peregrin "Pippin" Took''': Frodo's cousins and closest friends besides Sam, and basically the "comic relief duo" of the story, though they do both know how to get serious when needed. Among other things they help get the Ents to join the War of the Ring and kick Saruman's teeth in and partake in many of the big battles of the War of the Ring. Merry helps Eowyn kill the Witch-King (albeit by stabbing him in the back while he'd distracted), and Pippin [[Slayers|''kills a Troll'']]. They also each get to don the attire of one of the great kingdoms of Men (Rohan for Merry and Gondor for Pippin).
* '''Fredeger "Fatty" Bolger''': Frodo's other friend, but never makes an appearance in the movies. Fatty gets a bad rap for not wanting to leave with Frodo and go through the Old Forest, but he still had a part to play in staying behind and convince people that Frodo still lived in the Shire. When the Nazgul arrived, he raised the Horn of Buckland to drive them off, and later aided Frodo in the Scouring of the Shire. On a darker note, after being locked away by the ruffians to starve, no one called him Fatty anymore.
* '''Farmer Maggot''': Local farmer...or so he seems. In fact, he is one of the few Hobbits in the Shire who not only knows about what goes on in the greater world, but actively works in conjunction with Gandalf as needed to ferry and receive information. [[Awesome|So basically a Hobbit Secret Agent]].
* '''The Sackville Baggins''': Proof that even Hobbits can be unlikable assholes, the Sackville-Baggins are relatives of Frodo who neither he nor anyone else particularly like. Basically a couple of obnoxious gold-diggers who Frodo sells the Shire to before heading off on his journey (an action he doesn't enjoy more than anyone else). If there's any nice thing that can be said about them, it's that they ''do'' later assist in the ejection of Sharkey and his goons from the Shire, showing they, like all Hobbits, can be courageous when it matters most. Absent in the movies, but unlike Glorfindel and [[Tom Bombadil|a certain someone]], most aren't likely to mind too much.

==Valar, Maiar, and anything in between==
[[Ainur|Have their own page]].

==Orcs==
'''Orcs/Goblins:''' See [[Orc#Tolkien|Orcs]]. Though not what you see with [[Stormtrooper|Imperial Stormtrooper variants]], they still come in a few varieties:
* '''Snaga''': The Black Speech word for Slave or Servant. This contemptuous term is used amongst the Orcs of Mordor and Isengard to refer to the "lesser" AKA regular Orcs, with the implication that they are only fighting for their master because they are being forced to.
* '''[[Black Orc|Uruks]]:''' A superior breed of Orcs created by Sauron in the middle of the Third Age through either eugenic practices or dark sorcery, most likely both. Uruks are resistant to sunlight (or at least far more able to tolerate it), and are taller and stronger than their lesser kin, though possibly only almost as tall or strong as Men. ''Uruk'' is the Black Speech word for ''Orc'', which opens up a whole mess of questions as to why regular Orcs are not called Uruks while these orcs of superior breeding are, although it could simply be a matter of social hierarchy given the existence and roles of ''Snaga'' within Orc society.
**'''Black Uruks:''' Another name for the Uruks of Mordor who served Sauron. May possibly have been a title only granted to the cream of the crop of Uruks, being those were of the strongest breeding and greatest devotion to Sauron, and were possibly further augmented by being "infused" with Sauron's will or dark sorcerous enchantments.
**'''Uruk-Hai:''' Saruman's take on the above project, with these Orcs being the product of either crossbreeding lesser Orcs with Goblin-Men or crossbreeding Goblin-Men with Men, all with his own sorcery added to the mix. This experiment is said to been even more successful than Sauron's own, with the Orcs produced being as tall and strong as Men and very-resistant/tolerant of sunlight. The etymology of their name has some interesting implications, as said above, ''Uruk'' is Black Speech for Orc, while ''Hai'' is the suffix for "''Folk''"/people, with the result being "Orc-Folk". By calling themselves this, the Uruk-Hai are saying that they are the Orc-People, while all the other Orcs are merely just Orcs and not worthy of being called a people, [[Nazi|which sounds very master-race-like doesn't it?]] In-universe, the other Orcs who interacted with them hate and distrust the Uruk-Hai of Isengard for placing themselves above them and looking down on them, which lends credence to this implication.
* '''Goblin-Men/Half-Orcs''': A hybrid of lesser Orcs and Humans. Look mostly human, albeit rather ugly and "sallow-skinned". Often serve as spies for their full-blooded kin, but most seemed to exist as outlaws and bandits, possibly being the descendants of fully Human criminals and outcasts who shacked up with the Orcs who lived in the Misty Mountains and other isolated areas. Half-Orcs may have been a distinctive breed apart from Goblin-Men, but the differences between the two are never made clear. Very, very minor part of the lore, and you hardly ever see them outside of the books proper.
* '''Mountain Orcs/Goblins:''' Orcs that live in the Misty Mountains and other northern mountain ranges. Largely left to do their own thing, they mug random passersby and launch raids against human settlements. Looked down on by Mordor Orcs and Uruk-Hai as being a bunch of feral tribals, who in turn look down on them for being "slaves to the Shadow" even though they are quick to bend the knee when emissaries from Mordor come calling. Sometimes called Goblins due to linguistic shenanigans, but either way they are the same size and "race" as other normal Orcs, although many extra-canonical works tend to call Mountain Orcs goblins and portray them as being the smallest of the Orc breeds. Less so in the movies and video games based on them, where Goblins are indeed treated as distinct from "regular" Orcs.
* '''Snufflers''': A race of small, darkfurred orcs with big nostrils who were used like humanoid hunting hounds by their larger cousins. May have simply been a mutation or breedable trait rather than an actual sub-race. Never seen or mentioned outside of the books, so they're a concept that didn't catch on with most folks.

Similarly, while they get less attention than the Free Peoples, there are still some named Orc/Uruk-hai characters in the franchise:

* '''Azog the Defiler''': An Orc Chieftain of Moria prior to the events of The Hobbit. He murdered the Dwarven King Thrór, and had the gall to say that he executed him for "trespassing" in Moria. He beheaded Thrór, branded his own name on his forehead in Dwarven Runes, and even dismembered his corpse after insulting Thrór's companion Nár and throwing a small bag of gold coins to him. This event started the ''War of the Dwarves and Orcs'', which ended when Dáin II Ironfoot slew Azog at the Battle of Azanulbizar. Azog was succeeded by his son Bolg.
** The Peter Jackson Hobbit movies had him survive his canon death so as to effectively become the main villain of the trilogy. [[Rage|Most fans were not impressed]].
* '''Bolg''': Bolg, son of Azog, was an Orc Chieftain who led a coalition of Orcs during the time of The Hobbit. Vengeful over his father's death at the hands of the Dwarves, he rallied the Orcs of the Misty Mountains along with the Orcs of Goblin Town at Mount Gundabad, and along with a host of Wargs, marched them to battle at Erebor for the Battle of Five Armies. Bolg was killed in battle by Beorn, who had taken the shape of a bear.
**In the Hobbit Trilogy, Bolg is demoted to a second-in-command due to dad still being alive, and Legolas kills him instead after a battle that [[Wat|involves him defying gravity.]]
* '''Uglúk''': An Uruk-Hai of Isengard who led the company which attacked the Fellowship at Amon Hen and captured Merry and Pippin. After being harried and encircled by Riders of Rohan under Éomer's command, Uglúk and his entire company were slain in battle, with Uglúk being personally killed by Éomer in a sword-fight.
* '''Gothmog''': Only mentioned briefly in Return of the King and no other description given than "Castellan of Minas Morgul", he took command over Mordors force that was still besieging Minas Tirith after the Witch-King was slain. The reason he is listed here is because Peter Jackson made him a heavily scarred Orc in the movie adaptation, the books never mention his race. Some Tolkien Scholars hold the opinion that he was actually one of the Nazgûl.
* '''Grishnákh''': An Orc Captain of Mordor who led his own raiding party of Mordor Orcs in search of the Fellowship. He crossed paths with Uglúk's company in Rohan and tried to intimidate him into turning over Merry and Pippin to his custody, but was unable to do so and lacked the numbers to overtake the individually superior Uruk-Hai. He attempted to depart to the east, but was driven back towards Uglúk's company by the encircling Riders under Éomer, and thus made his last stand together with Uglúk's company near the eaves of the Fangorn Forest.
* '''Gorbag''': A Black Uruk Captain of Mordor who personally served the Nazgûl in Minas Morgul. He; together with Shagrat; found a paralyzed Frodo while on patrol near Cirith Ungol. He was rather observant and wily for an Orc, and was able to deduce that Frodo was not alone in his trespassing and was merely paralyzed by Shelob instead of dead. He attempted to steal Frodo's mithril shirt for himself, but in doing so provokes a fight with Shagrat, which in turn sparks a small insurrection which pitted Gorbag's patrol against Shagrat's garrison. After shanking Shagrat and failing to finish him off with a broken spear, he is killed and trampled by Shagrat. In the movies, it's Shagrat who tries to take the shirt and Gorbag who is loyal to Sauron, and Sam kills him instead.
* '''Shagrat''': A Black Uruk Lieutenant of Mordor who commanded the garrison of the Tower of Cirith Ungol. Shagrat disagreed with Gorbag about what to do with Frodo, and tensions between him and Gorbag's troops sparked a small insurrection. After slaying Gorbag and defeating his underlings, Shagrat took Frodo's mithril shirt and journeyed to Barad-dûr. After delivering the mithril shirt and news of the incident at Cirith Ungol, he was executed by Sauron. In the movie, he's the one who tries to take the shirt for himself, but otherwise presumably dies in the same way.

==[[Dragons]]==
The classic, archetypal dragon. Created by Morgoth in the First Age as his most powerful agents. Sub-Types include:
*'''Cold-drakes''': Lesser Dragons who are unable to breath fire, but they are still a couple tons of muscle and scales and are more numerous than the proper Fire-drake Dragons. Those that remain live in the frozen wasteland of Forodwaith in the desolate north of Middle Earth, although even then they still fuck with the Dwarves who lived in the Grey Mountains, even managing to infest the valley of the Withered Heath.
*'''Sea-serpents''': Also known as Fish-dragons, little is known about this particular breed of dragons except what they were called by, and that Morgoth had also created them. It can be devised that they were either intended to fight Cirdan and the Elven ships in Beleriand; to battle the Host of the West, which would have to cross the ocean; to contest with Ulmo, just as the winged-dragons contested with Manwë and his eagles; or some combination of these possibilities.
*'''Spark-dragons''': Sometimes known as Shock-dragons. Nothing is known about them save for this Elven nomenclature.

As for named Dragons of note:

* '''Glaurung''': The Father of all Dragons, and a [[Nagash| thoroughly sadistic prick]] whose main claim to infamy is hypnotizing and cursing Turin into marrying and knocking up his own sister for sick kicks before his death. He is slain by Turin's cursed sword, Gurthang, but gets the last laugh by revealing Turin's marriage is incestuous with his dying words.

* '''The Fire-drake of Gondolin''': An unnamed Dragon that partook in the Sacking of Gondolin. Big enough to carry ''multiple Balrogs'' on its back. Its physiology and its being unleashed on Gondolin alongside the Balrogs suggests it may have been meant to be Glaurung's replacement, but it too was presumably eventually slain (although its death is never outright shown).

* '''Scatha the Wyrm''': So named for his long, serpentine body, he was a treasure-hoarder like Smaug. Got killed by an ancestor of Eorl the Young named Fram after the local men and Dwarves got sick of him stealing from them.

* '''Gostir''': This dragon is only known by name and was one of Morgoth's dragons. Nothing else is written about him, not even what kind of dragon he was! However, considering that ''Gostir'' is Sindarin for "Terrible Sight", he must have been either one extremely ugly or especially scary-looking dragon. Alternatively, if you interept the "thîr" comprisant component of his Sindarin name to refer not to his face, but instead his expression as per one of the alternative definitions of that word; then Gostir might have been a dragon that had an especially potent hypnotic or mesmerizing stare like that of Glaurung.

* '''Ancalagon the Black''': Morgoth's ultimate Dragon, he saw action during the epic War of Wrath and fell during the battle despite initially [[Awesome|beating back the entire host of the Valar]]. Also one of ''the'' biggest fucking Dragons in all of fiction, as multiple "Dragon size comparisons" on the internet have shown. Seriously, this guy was the size of ''mountains'', and his death destroyed some too when he fell from the sky. How in the heck the good guys were ever able to beat Morgoth with this dude on his side is anyone's guess.

* '''Smaug''': The last, and by far the most famous, of all the Middle-Earth Dragons, he lived into the Third Age where he took over Erebor, slaughtered the Dwarves there, and helped himself to their treasure. He lorded over the mountain and its hoard for many years until a company of Dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield and aided by Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf the Grey finally coaxed him out of his lair, leading to his eventual death when Bard the Bowman shot an arrow that hit him in his one weak-spot. Probably the single most iconic part of The Hobbit, and a highlight of both movie adaptations (yes, even the widely disliked Hobbit trilogy).

==Other Creatures==
'''[[Trolls]]''': Made by Morgoth "in mockery of the Ents", Trolls are giant and stupid creatures often used by the orcs as warbeasts. Like the Orcs themselves, some specially bred Trolls are called "Olog-Hai" and are used as especially dangerous shock troops. Certain breeds, called "stone trolls," will turn to stone when exposed to sunlight.
*'''Olog-Hai''': Sapient trolls who were the troll equivalent of Uruk-Hai.
*'''Half-trolls of Far-Harad''': A possibly mythical race of allegedly half Troll and Men crossbreeds. The confusion is due to them only being referenced a single time within canon at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where the warriors of Far Harad who fought for Sauron were likened to "Half-trolls" and described as being rather large and having "black skin with white eyes and red tongues". May have just been African-type warriors, but the fact that they were described as having "white eyes and red tongues", suggests that they were not actually normal Men, and instead [[Salamanders (Chapter)|Salamander-like]] giants with pitch-black skin and blank, pupil-less white eyes and scarlet red tongues. Alternatively, they COULD have been actually half-man, half-troll, Norwegian myth had that as an explanation for people who were especially ugly hermits or mighty yet ugly warriors. The warrior culture of the Far Harad tribals could view the jungle trolls as virile symbols of barbaric power and Savage Fertility, resulting in zulu-looking men and women boning wild trolls in the jungle, resulting in these bestial half-kin.
*'''Frost Trolls''': A large, shaggy breed of furred trolls native to the far north. Very minor part of the lore, with even more video games and other expanded material not using them.
*'''Ettens''': Another name for Trolls, in the same sense that Goblin is another name for Orcs. Namesake of the Ettenmoors, as Trolls used to infest the region during the time of the Witch-realm of Angmar. "The Etten" was the disguise of an Orc and Troll wearing the same costume to disguise themselves as a massive mutant Troll warlord in the Shadow of War game, so in that version of Middle Earth, Ettens could refer to the more popular pop culture version as two-headed trolls/giants with orcish blood popularized in D&D.

'''[[Treant|Ents]]''': Tree-herders, created by Yavanna to protect the forests. The Ents are extremely old, perhaps the only beings that can rival elves in age. They speak their own unique language that sounds like creaking wood, and are very slow and deliberate in their actions. The Ents are divided into males and females, but by the Third Age, the Entwives have disappeared, leaving the Ent race to eventually vanish.

'''[[Ogres]]''': In-between Orc and Troll in Size, probably mythical and in the same circumstances as the Giants given that they were only mentioned in The Hobbit as well. May also have just been another name for Trolls. Three of them were among Azog's horde in the Hobbit movies during their assault on Laketown, and Games Workshop included models of them for their game.

'''Giants''': Huge humanoids of myth. Only referenced in passing through tales of folklore, but did make an appearance in The Hobbit, where "stone-giants" were described as throwing rocks at each while the Thorin's party attempted to passed through the Misty Mountains. That Giants did not appear or were explicitly referenced after The Hobbit suggests that they were an early idea which was dropped from the greater canon when Tolkien consolidated it with the writing of the main series.

'''[[Werewolves]]''': Fearsome wolves possessed by evil spirits, created as minions of Morgoth in the First Age, but have lingered on throughout the following ages.

'''[[Vampires]]''': Either possibly humanoid bats or just really large sapient and malevolent blood-drinking bats created as minions of Morgoth in the First Age. Very little is known about them. Associated mainly with Sauron, who took the form of one on at least one occasion to escape from Huan, and because the only named Vampire; Thuringwethil; was a servant of Sauron.

'''Nameless Things:''' Things without names, of course. Or much description for that matter. Said by Gandalf to be older than Sauron and live deep beneath the Earth, such that even the Dwarves have never encountered them. Gandalf encountered them in passing while he fought Durin's Bane deep in the tunnels of the Earth after he fell from the bridge of Khazad-Dûm, but even then he refuses to "darken the light of day" with a description of them. Tolkien makes the inference that because these Nameless Things are nameless, that makes them especially dreadful and evil, though they're also largely unconnected with the main conflict that plays out in the story, and exist mostly to add to the world's mystery, as not all dangerous and terrible things are under the Dark Lord's control. They seem rather [[Lovecraft|Lovecraftian]] in their description. Various types of Nameless Things were featured in the Lord of the Rings MMO, including one that was infecting orcs with a parasitic fungus like the Cordyceps strain from The Last of Us to turn them into its own army

'''Mewlips''': Evil, amphibious creatures that prey on travelers in the Long Marshes. Possibly fictitious, or misidentified orcs. Some older LOTR RPG materials described them as some form of ghoul-like aquatic undead. Could also be some sort of subspecies of Orc which overcame their dislike of water to become something akin to [[Koalinth|Koalinths]].

'''Mumakil''': Giant elephant-like creatures from Far Harad, used by the Southrons as warbeasts much in the same way as war elephants of ancient times were used.

'''Great beasts/Great beasts of Gorgoroth''': Large beasts of burden used in Mordor. Not described in any detail at all, except that they were used to pull the battering ram Grond during the Siege of Minas Tirith. Are shown in the game "Gollum" as ornery, rhino-like creatures used as beasts of burden by the Uruks.

'''[[Undead]]''': exist in various forms and are specific in how they come about. The most iconic are the Nazgul, or ring-wraiths. Wraiths are a special class of undead that are apparently created and controlled by Sauron when he enslaves a mortal being to his will, principally through the life-extending rings of power. Magic is used to bind the wraith's invisible flesh to their spirit, and it is only with special magic weapons that they can be killed (or the One Ring is destroyed). Next are ghosts, as seen with the Oathbreakers. Because they have no physical presence, ghosts cannot actually interact with the mortal realm. Normally, human spirits leave Arda altogether upon death, but the Oathbreakers are a special case because of the nature of their curse. Illuvatar doesn't allow their spirits to leave Arda until their oaths are fulfilled. Lastly, you have the Barrow-Wights, which are described as dead bodies inhabited by evil spirits; its suggested that these evil spirits are the souls of dead elves (who didn't go to the Halls of Mandos) that were captured by Sauron and enslaved to his will.

'''Caragors''': Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War exclusive, being basically bigger, nastier Wargs. Devs even said they're to a Warg what a lion is to a wolf.

'''Graugs''': Also a Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War exclusive. Large, ugly giant monsters big enough to literally eat trolls for breakfast, but can be mounted by Talion, at which point he can basically use them like a [[Awesome|fantasy version of King Kong in New York City]]. Their full name is "Olog-Graug", which would indicate they are actually some sort of enormous, feral troll.

'''Creatures of Myth''': These creatures are likely fictional, as they are only referenced in poems, verse, song, or story. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they weren't actually real. Tolkien did like to keep an air of mystery about it.
*'''Were-Wyrms''': Giant Sandworms like something out of Dune or Tremors. Possibly mythical, as they were only referenced offhandedly in The Hobbit, in a line that suggests they are something of a folktale. Showed up in the third Peter Jackson Hobbit movie. Older media portrayed them as a form of wingless, legless dragon.
*'''Turtle-Fish''': Giant Snapping Turtle sea monsters. Pretended to be islands before sinking when prey got off their boats and explored their shell, before consuming the drowning sailors. Mentioned only in verse within The Hobbit.
*'''Glowworms and Great glow-worms''': Bioluminescent worms of myth said to "creep along the Path of Dreams". Only mentioned in early versions of the legendarium.
*'''Badger-Folk''': Upright walking sapient badgers, skepticism is required due to this being told as part of a story by Tom Bombadil.
*'''Lintips''': Small, mousey-smelling creatures from the Moon which rode down to Middle-Earth on a moonbeam. Another tall tale from Tom Bombadil.

==Items of significance==
We're kind of bloating the definition of "character" here, but there are quite a couple of items in Middle-Earth that might as well be characters since Tolkien assigns a great deal of significance to them.

*'''Rings of Power''': The titular magical rings. There are 20 in total: 3 Elven Rings, 7 Dwarfen Rings, 9 Human Rings and the Master Ring. The Rings were created as incredibly powerful magical artifacts by the Elven smith Celebrimbor in Eregion, intended to perserve the world and increase the wisdom and abilities of the wearer. However, this intended purpose was corrupted by Sauron who helped Celebrimbor in the creation of the Dwarfen and Human Rings. Sauron intended the Rings to be conduits through which he could control the races of Middle-Earth via binding them all to his Master Ring. The Elven Rings stand out because they were created last and without Sauron's help and therefore remain untouched by his corruption (their power still hinges on the One Ring, though). Tolkien kept the description of what the Rings actually ''do'' very vague, from what we could gather from the Elven Rings, they probably all intended to fulfill its wearers deepest desires and guide their people to greater wisdom and understanding of the world. The Elven Rings were not used until Sauron was vanquished for the first time in the battle of the Last Alliance. By the time of the third age, their keepers were Elrond, Galadriel and Gandalf. Galadriel used the power of her Ring to preserve a vision of Valinor in Lothlorien and keep evil out of the forests (to the point that Orcs literally and figuratively could not enter it), what Elrond and Gandalf did with theirs is left to interpretation. The Dwarfen Rings are implied to be the main source of their legendary riches with the sideeffect that it made them really greedy, awakening the Balrog of Moria and attracting Smaug to Mount Erebor; the Dwarven rings were eventually destroyed or claimed by Sauron. Of the Rings of Men, we know next to nothing, except that their wearers are now the Nazgûl. The Master Ring has the power to dominate the other ringbearers and is strongly implied to be a sentient being of some kind. It radiates a strong allure to anyone who sees it, to the point that people find themselves unable to let it go once they have it (also why Bilbo giving it up is such a testament to his willpower; he was literally the only being in Middle-Earth who had the Ring and gave it up willingly).
*'''Lesser Rings''': created before the Rings of Power by Celebrimbor and his smiths as practice. As the name implies, their powers are significantly more mundane. Gandalf had originally believed that the ring Bilbo found was one of the lesser rings since it was plain and didn't seem to confer many special abilities. Some of them likely were in Sauron's possession and given to his commanders.
*'''Palantiri''': The seeing stones. There were seven in total that Elendil brought over from Numenor when he landed in Middle-Earth. They were perfect spheres made of black stone and rumored to have been created by Feanor himself. The Palantiri were the key to the early dominance of the Dunedain in Middle-Earth; with them, they could keep a watch over large swaths of the world and communicate with their kin in far away lands. Using a Palantir is a daunting and esoteric task that was not well understood even when knowledge of the existence of the stones was relatively common (emphasis on relative, the existence of the Palantiri was one of the closest held secrets of the Dunedain) and as a result, the mileage one could get out of them varied wildly, generally speaking, they responded best to people the stones thought were their rightful owners. Sauron and Saruman famously were frustrated with their inability to utilize their respective Palantirs full potential; for example, Saruman wanted to use the Palantir of Orthanc to search for the ring but found Sauron instead. By the time of the third age, only four of the seven Palantiri were left: The Palantir of Orthanc which was in Sarumans possession and passed onto Gandalf when Grima threw it out of a window. Gandalf took the Palantir with him to Valinor. Sauron held the Palantir of Minas Ithil, stolen when the Nazgûl sieged and destroyed the city and destroyed when Barad-Dûr collapsed as a result of the destruction of the One Ring. Denethor, by the power of his office, held the Palantir of Minas Tirith, where it passed onto Aragorn when he became King. A fourth one sat in a tower on the western edge of Arnor, directed at where Numenor used to be. The other there were over time lost to the passing of time, Gondor lost the Ithil-Stone when the Nazgûl destroyed Minas Ithil. The largest Palantir of them all was located in Osgiliath and was lost when the city burned down during the Kin-Strife. Arnor had three, one in Annuminas and one in Amon Sûl. All three were lost when Arvedui, the last reigning king of Arnor sought refuge from the Witch-King of Angmar in Forodwaith and drowned when a rescue party sent by the elves of Lindon failed to save him; the stones sank together with their owner.

==Apocryphal Characters==
Due to the huge, enduring popularity of Tolkien's writing, many folks over the years have made their own contributions to the lore, effectively giving Tolkien's writings their own "expanded universe". None of these are canon with the books however, and so are listed here instead. Due to how the purists tend to feel about this sort of thing, pretty much all of the characters here are [[Skub]] by default.
===From Movies===
* '''Alfrid''': The Master of Laketown's own personal Wormtongue, and even more obnoxious and hatable. Much as Jar-Jar Binks is often seen as the character who killed the Prequels (or else dragged them down), Alfrid is seen in much the same way regarding the Hobbit movies. Not helped by the fact that he ''gets away with everything'' (unless you watch the extended cut that is).
* '''Lurtz''': Probably one of the most famous "not in the books" characters ever, Lurtz is an Uruk-hai leader made by Saruman in the PJ movies who is in charge of the band sent to Amon Hen. He's the one who personally puts three arrows into Boromir before Aragorn moves in to take him out in a suitably epic one-on-one fight scene. Due to the popularity of the PJ movies, the aforementioned epic fight scene, and the fact that Lurtz isn't ''that'' important of a character, he tends to be a lot more accepted than many other non-canon characters. Lurtz's role in the books likely would have been taken by Uglúk instead, but PJ wanted to have a menacing Orc antagonist in the first film that would be memorable by being the one to kill Boromir and give Aragorn a tough fight, and to represent the unique threat that the Uruk-Hai posed compared to the bog-standard orc.
* '''Sharku''': Leader of Saruman's Warg Riders, which guaranteed him status as a boss battle in a few of the video games. Also used to fake out killing off Aragorn in the second movie before Aragorn returned alive. Looks a lot like Freddy Krueger, and his name is a reference to Saruman's book alias during the Scouring of the Shire, "Sharkey".
* '''Tauriel''': A redheaded Elf waifu played by Evangeline Lily who is crushed on by Legolas and Kili, to [[Rage|the totally chill reactions of most audiences and fans]]. All told she ''is'' reasonably cool, but the general feeling is that making her part of a love triangle that goes nowhere was a dumb idea. Not to mention the "forbidden love" angle had already been done.
* '''Gothmog''': Only apocryphal-ish, since he ''does'' get a mention in Return of the King, being referred by his title "Castellan of Minas Morgul" in two sentences, where he is mentioned taking command of the Orcish warhost that is besieging Minas Tirith after the Witch-King was slain. Other than that, nothing is known about him and he never does get mentioned again, not even in passing. While some Tolkien Scholars hold the opinion that Tolkien was referring to one of the Nazgûl (since Gothmog was the King of the Balrogs, and it seems weird to not assign a name of such a powerful creature to an equally mighty servant of Sauron), Peter Jacksons interpretation of Gothmog was that of a heavily scarred and crippled Orc general that leads the troops on the ground during the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Minas Tirith. A bit ironic is the fact that, while he is clearly intended to be Gothmog, he is actually never mentioned by name in the movie. Also fun fact, he was played the same Maori actor who also played the Witch-King and Lurtz.

===From Video Games===
*'''The Third Age Second Fellowship''': A B-Team Fellowship who are the playable characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Sadly, they're all very, very stock as characters, but at least they got to be the protagonists of one of the better Middle-Earth games.
** '''Berethor''': Gondor Citadel Guard sent by Denethor to find his son Boromir, and also secretly a Manchurian Agent for Saruman and carries another secret in his body. Is fear-proof, and this is actually something that factors into the gameplay.
** '''Idrial''': Discount Arwen, being a female Elf who fights with a falchion and water magic and who falls in love with the heroic man of Gondor (Berethor in this case). Gets a bit green-eyed when Morwen shows up as a result.
** '''Elegost''': A Dunedain Ranger who is the party's token archer character. [[Gotrek & Felix|Is best friends with a Dwarf named Hadhod, who is his travelling companion]].
** '''Hadhod''': Party's token Dwarf, but can do shit Gimli can't (fire and earth magic, namely). [[Gotrek & Felix|Is best friends with a Ranger named Elegost, who is his travelling companion]].
** '''Morwen''': Woman of Rohan [[Rule 34|with a bare midriff]] orphaned when Saruman's forces scour the lands, she joins the party as the closest thing they have to a dedicated thief/rogue. [[Slayers|Fights with dual axes and has a need for vengeance against the enemy]].
** '''Eaoden''': Last member of the party to be recruited, which sadly has the effect of making him even ''more'' lacking in personality than the rest. Also from Rohan, he's one of Theoden's Royal Guards and can actually become a serious powerhouse depending on how you allocate his points.
*'''Battle for Middle-Earth OCs''': Since not every faction in these games has a large number of named folks from the books and films to draw on, EA had to get creative, and so invented some playable hero units whole cloth:
** '''Drogoth the Dragon Lord''': Hero unit for the Goblins, and basically going "fuck that" to the idea of Smaug being the last dragon.
** '''Gorkil the Goblin King''': Goblin with delusions of grandeur who hopes to win Sauron's favor by causing trouble in the North. Rides a giant scorpion into battle.
** '''Hwaldar the Brigand''': A Rhudaur hill chief secretly in league with the Witch-King. Hero unit for the Angmar faction.
** '''Karsh the Whisperer''': Former Captain of Arnor named Carthaen who the Witch-King turns into a wraith to serve as one of his minions instead of his enemies. Hero unit for Angmar.
** '''Morgomir''': Lieutenant of Carn Dûm and a Black Numenorean captain who has become of the Nazgul themselves. Hero unit for Angmar.
** '''Rogash''': The Witch-King's right-hand Troll, being a lot smarter and more dangerous than the standard Olog. Hero unit for Angmar.
*'''Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War Characters''': The cast of Monolith Production's video game duology:
**'''Talion''': Protagonist and pure Badass by way of being a brutal one-man army who can cleave through scores of Uruks, kill Ologs, bring Fire Drakes to heel, and even ''fight and beat Nazgul and Sauron himself''. Looks a lot like Aragorn, but his story goes down a much darker path. Slain along with his wife and son at the start of the game, he is resurrected (sort of), by the spirit of Celebrimbor, turning him into a wraith ''not'' bound to Sauron. From there, he becomes [[Konrad Curze|a ruthless, brutal figure who lives in a world of darkness and evil surrounded on all sides by evildoers he spends his time brutally killing, maiming, and terrorizing]]. Ultimately becomes a cautionary tale about trying to be a Grimdark Anti-Hero in Tolkien's world though; his bearing a new ring of power made by Celebrimbor and using it to bend Uruks and Ologs to his will to build an army in Mordor, makes him all-too similar to the Dark Lord he's fighting against. It culminates in him losing said Ring, taking a discarded Nazgul ring to save himself, and as a result, becoming one of Sauron's nine Nazgul. A lesson in ''not'' fighting Sauron using his methods learned the hard way. In all, most Tolkien purists would consider him way too [[Grimdark]] for J.R.R.'s fiction, and have argued that Tolkien would be horrified by his game's content. But again, given what happens to Talion, it's clear the writers understood the inherent folly in trying to fight Sauron with his own methods. Talion is best seen then as a cautionary tale (and thus a reaffirming of Tolkien's values), not a bastardization ([[Skub|this does not stop people from seeing him and his games as that though)]].
**'''Ioreth and Dirhael''': Talion's wife and son, who, as the wife and son of a tragic Anti-Hero in a [[Grimdark]] story, suffer exactly the fate you expect them to. In Ioreth's case, [[Critical Role|this is not the only time her VA has played a character in a Fantasy series with a sexy faux-British accent who's in love with a brooding, vengeful Anti-Hero]].
**'''The Black Captains''': A trio of Black Numenoreans who act as the main antagonists of the first game. Each represents a different aspect of Sauron's character, and as the folks who murdered Talion's wife and son, are at the top of his shit-list. They are:
***'''Black Hand of Sauron''': Leader of the bunch. [[Tzeentch|Represents the deceitfulness of Sauron]]. Lets his body become a vessel for Sauron so that the latter can temporarily regain his iconic black-armored, physical form.
***'''Hammer of Sauron''': A former Numenorean from the Battle of the Last Alliance [[Angron|who was angry and resentful enough to turn on his fellows]], picking up Sauron's discarded mace and letting it corrupt him (since it seems all of Sauron's stuff does that). [[Khorne|Represents Sauron's physical might and just a generally very angry guy]].
***'''Tower of Sauron''': A tall, scary guy [[Slaanesh|who looks a bit like something out of Hellraiser and accordingly serves as a torturer for Sauron. He represents the horror and viciousness of Sauron]].
**'''Eltariel''': A black-clad Elf who acts as a personal assassin for Galadriel, specially tasked with fighting the Nazgul. Badass enough to keep pace with Talion (and ironically has the same voice actress as his dead wife). Takes the New Ring after Talion loses it and becomes a Nazgul.
**'''Idril''': Gondorian woman who is the daughter of the man in charge of Minas Ithil (which falls much later in the Shadow of Mordor/War continuity). Her daddy betrays the city to the Witch-King on the condition that Idril will be spared, and afterwards Idril leads the surviving Gondorian forces in Mordor. Comments on various collectibles Talion can find scattered throughout Mordor.
** '''Baranor''': A man born in Harad who was given to Gondor as part of a peace exchange and raised by them. Actually did pretty well for himself, becoming a captain in Gondor's army and helping lead the defense of Minas Ithil before it falls. Playable in one of Shadow of War's DLCs, and since he has no Ring of Power, if he dies, its actually Game Over.
**'''Carnan''': An Ent-Wife (or else something like it) and a super-powerful nature spirit who talks weird. Said to be a contemporary of Morgoth, which would make her ''ancient'' if true. Resides in a very forested, scenic part of Mordor that feels more like a part of Lothlorien or Rivendell then anything under Sauron's control, but that is likely owing in part to Carnan's presence. Though mostly a neutral figure unconcerned with the affairs of lesser beings, when a Balrog starts burning her forest down, she joins forces with Talion and Celebrimbor.
**'''Tar-Goroth''': A Balrog awakened by the forging of the New Ring, meaning his rampage is technically Talion and Celebrimbor's fault. There for the sake of having a boss fight with a Balrog.
**'''Zog the Eternal''': An Uruk sorcerer who seeks to summon Tar-Goroth and use him as a living weapon, including against Sauron himself, making him an Uruk with delusions of grandeur. Suffice to say, Talion puts a stop to his plans.
**'''Bruz the Chopper''': An Olog with an Australian accent who is one of Talion's first recruits, but later turns on him when he doesn't get a promotion. Talion responds by mind-raping him, which drives him insane. What happens to him after that is up to the player.
**'''Suladan''': OC Nazgul made for the games, one who funny enough shares a name with one of Games Workshop's original characters from the Lord of the Rings: Strategy Battle Game. Nothing to suggest this is the same character though. His backstory is basically Ar-Pharazon, but a king of the South instead of Numenor, and turned into a Nazgul instead of getting punished by Eru.
**'''Nazgul Sisters (Riya and Yukka)''': Yes, seriously. A pair of twin sisters from an [[Cathay|obscure, rarely seen kingdom of man based off of Asian cultures]] who killed two of Sauron's Nazgul and took their Rings for themselves...which turned them into new Nazgul. Actually try to take power for themselves, but after Eltariel whoops their asses they seem to give up on that idea. Fight with Kusarigama type weapons instead of the usual Morgul Blades.

===From Amazon's Rings of Power===
*'''Arondir''': Black Legolas with a bit of Aragorn / Beren mixed in, or else a male Arwen, since he's doing the whole Elf/Human romance thing, which his fellow Elves point out doesn't end happily for those who do it. Might be Theo's father, but unconfirmed as yet.
*'''Bronwyn''' - Arondir's forbidden human lover (so the Luthien to his Beren, but with the races reversed), who is most notable for [[Derp|somehow commanding humans that escaped Orc invasion despite being a simple farmer (yeah, no signs of any class higher than peasants at all in Southlands)]].
*'''Theo''': Bronwyn's son that currently has super cool dark weapon on his hands, which seems to be a Morgul Blade, leading to fan theories that he'll turn into a Nazgul. Notably, we never get a good look at his ears, suggesting he might be Arondir's kid (which would fit given that he's his mom's boyfriend).
*'''[[Sauron|Halbrand]]''': Mysterious human that joins Galadriel in her quest. Has a lot in common with Aragorn (such as being the successor to a kingdom long vanished), but was ultimately revealed to be a certain ''other'' canon character. Given all of the hints beforehand, namely his silver tongue, talent for manipulation, the fact that he's trying to rule the Southlands (aka Mordor), his asking Adar (who claimed to kill Sauron), if he recognized him, and keen interest and skill in blacksmithing, (to the point that he claimed no one knew the craft better than him and was able to help Celebrimbor make the Rings of Power), this identity reveal didn't come as a shock to anybody when it came...except Galadriel. Speaking of, he got the hots for her during the time they spent together, and attempted to convince her to join him, but it didn't take (obviously). At the end of the season, he does what none should be able to do...[[Meme|he simply walked into Mordor]].
*'''Adar''': Elvish for "father", he's [[Malekith|a corrupted but charismatic black armored Elf]] (according to himself, he's a "first-generation orc", with visible scar on his head where Morgoth poured his evil... corruption juice... thing) who leads a band of Orcs hoping to do...something. Might be Maedhros (since he's got a gauntlet over one hand, and Maedhros burned one of his hands grabbing a Silmaril). Played by Benjen Stark's actor, meaning both of the Stark brother's actors have now been in Middle-Earth adaptations.
*'''Eärien''': Elendil's daughter and an architect-in-training, and that's pretty much it so far. She opposes intervention into the Middle Earth and Pharazôn's son has the hots for her. While the showrunners decided to include her for "female energy," she does very little to actually drive the plot, apart from convince Kemen to burn some ships in order to stop the Numenoreans from leaving because... reasons?
*'''Kemen''': Pharazon's son (presumably from a woman other than Tar-Miriel, since Pharazon hasn't married her yet). Has the hots for Elendil's daughter.
*'''Nori Brandyfoot''' - <s>Hobbit</s>Harfoot girl, since we can't have a Tolkien adaptation without Hobbits. Like Frodo and Bilbo pretty clearly meant to be an audience surrogate, but a lot more eager for adventure at the outset than the latter. Probably won't be carrying anyone's ring around, but you never know. Currently palling around with a mysterious stranger who might actually be Gandalf, furthering the Frodo/Bilbo parallels. No relation to the Dwarf of Thorin's company despite the name.
*'''Poppy Proudfellow''': Sam to Nori's Frodo, basically. Not much else to say.
*'''Sadoc Burrows''': Elder of the Harfoot tribe. There was some initial controversy over his casting, with some people even making the point that [[derp|how did the isolated hobbits change from multi-ethnic to lilY-white after a few centuries?]] (Though Tolkien does describe the Harfoots as darker skinned than other Hobbit types). His character became even more [[skub]] when it was discovered that in spite of the Harfoot's claims that "nobody gets left behind" and "harfoots have hearts as big as their feet," they very regularly abandon other tribe members to death and even outright sabotage their wagons if the tribe gets fed up with them. So yeah, people think of harfoots as sociopaths now. In Sadoc's case though, its suggested that his having to leave behind his own wife and child hardened him into his current state. Dies after getting knifed by the Morgoth cult, even though Meteor Man should be able to heal him.
*'''Disa''': Durin's wife. [[/pol/|Her being black got the predictable reaction]], but she's actually more canon-friendly than many of the other characters in the show due to the fact that her name is listed in the appendices (though many people still complained WHERE'S HER BEARD???). Helps convince her husband to cut Elrond some slack for not seeing him in 20 years. Disa is also some sort of priestess for Khazad-Dum, apparently singing to the mountain to free dwarves trapped in a cave-in. For a moment people joked that maybe ''she'' was Sauron when she suddenly morphed from cheery housewife to political schemer reminiscent of Darth Sidious himself (albeit a much less evil one).
*'''<s>Meteor Man</s> <s>Encino Man</s> The Stranger''': Mysterious old man who crash-landed in Harfoot territory, and was befriended by Nori. He can't speak the common tongue and appears to be very proficient in magic, while also not understanding basic concepts like death. Most figure he's Gandalf or maybe Radagast, but other theories abound (everything from his being Sauron to being a Blue Wizard, [[Wat|to being a Balrog]]). He's confirmed in the Season 1 finale to be an Istari, with ''HEAVY'' implications that he's Gandalf, but he likely will only be referred to by one of his lesser-known names like Olorin. So ultimately, [[Superman|he's a human-looking being of great power who crash-lands from another world and is taken in by kind-hearted rural people. Sound familiar?]]
*'''<s>Feminem</s> <s>Slim Lady</s> The Priestess Trio''': Trio of white-clad ladies, led by a buzzcut woman who gives the most dramatic stink-eye. Names are The Dweller, the Nomad, and the Ascetic. Lots of people thought she was Sauron from the trailer until they realized the character had boobs (and Amazon outright said it wasn't Sauron). Honestly we know basically nothing about her and her two pals since their first appearance in the show is only slightly longer than the trailer, but apparently they're tracking Meteor Man and seem to be part of a leftover Morgoth cult. Despite having magic on par with a wizard and shapeshifting abilities, and also being incredibly pale, they're ultimately revealed to be Easterlings from Rhun, with a strong implication that they will either become Nazgul or are some precursor to it (although it does also seem that the Stranger blows them up at the end, so they might just be dead). The leader has a crown in the spirit world, which brings to mind the Witch-King of Angmar. Bear in mind, the Rings of Power are what turn humans into Nazgul, and they don't get created until the very end of the season, so they probably ''aren't'' Nazgul. Barrow-Wights maybe?

Industrial Revolution

2023-03-04T14:44:31Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Transportation */

[[File:Steam engine in action.gif|300px|thumb|right|Knights clash, Nobles Plot, Kings Proclaim and Priests Preach. But for all their ambition, passion, glory, drive and zeal it's a few modestly well off men trying to figure out how to better drain flooded mines that change the world]]
{{topquote|The more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity. Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.|Arthur Conan Doyle}}
{{topquote|The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.|Opening line of a [[meme|copypasta]] that [[lulz|goes on to detail all the good things that have come from it]].}}
The '''Industrial Revolution''' was a period from about 1776 to 1914 which proved to be a major game changer for humanity. Many periods of history are laid out arbitrarily by historians for book-keeping purposes. An English peasant born at the tail end of the [[High Middle Ages]] in 1340 who was lucky enough to see the beginning of the [[Renaissance]] about 90 years later most likely wouldn't think that the world at the time of his birth was all that different from the one in which he died, even if he was glad that the whole "everybody's dropping dead of plague" spell did not come back. The same would not be true if said English fellow was born in 1780 and died in 1870. In that time the majority of people had moved from the countryside to cities, factories were making everything, you could cross the country in a train in a day and send a message to newfangled Dominion of Canada at the speed of light.

==Technology==
[[Image:Victorian factory.jpg|thumb|Right|400px|A Victorian Factory, Watch your Hands]]
The big thing of note here is energy. For most of the history of civilization, if humans wanted to do something like move a heavy object from point A to Point B, dig a hole, grind grain, work iron, or whatever else, they had to do it with muscle power, either their own, other peoples' or draft animals like oxen and horses. Later, they worked out how to put wind and flowing water to use with sails, watermills and windmills. These things were useful in their own right and by the 1700s they were used in a wide variety of operations, but both had serious limitations. There are only so many rivers where you can build water-powered mills and even in windy places there are calm days, so they primarily supplemented good hold man/horsepower. A human can produce about 100 watts (joules per second) of motive power continuously, while a horse can provide about 750 watts. In contrast a kilogram of wood produces about 16-21 megajoules of energy when burned and coal has about 30 megajoules, which comes in the form of heat. Steam engines use boiling water to turn that heat into motive force which can operate factory machines, propel ships and locomotives to carry cargo, dig ditches and more. Once they had been refined to a level of practical efficiency, steam engines forever changed the nature of how work got done. First this was done by belts, gears, and rods, and later by electrical power generated by steam (or other sources) turning generators to power electric motors and lights.

One of the key advances of the Industrial Revolution was the assembly line, which allowed rapid construction of goods by giving each worker a single task to be repeated instead of requiring they have specialized knowledge of the whole process. While this idea goes back to at least the Venetian Arsenal in the Middle Ages, it became the standard during this era thanks to breakthroughs in milling, grinding, and lathing metal powered by steam (these machines were also a pre-requisite for the creation of precision instruments, without which you can't even make the machines that make the machines that make the final product). One side effect of making things on an assembly line is that items were broken into interchangeable parts that were replaceable if they broke, where before repairs were specialized work done by craftsmen, if they could be accomplished at all. The assembly line ultimately led to the proliferation of cheap automobiles, which revolutionized the concept of personal transport; the most prominent example was the Ford Model T, which was the first inexpensive mass-market automobile and remains one of the most-sold cars in history. These early cars all had unique controls and the modern, standardized control layout would not be invented until 1916 and would not achieve popularity until after 1922. Likewise, while assembly line techniques blossomed in the late 19th and early 20th century, it wouldn't be until World War II that quality control was tight enough that parts were interchangeable between factories.

Education also improved and became more universal during this era. By 1800 literacy was near universal in the United States, though this figure may not be counting slaves. Indeed, high literacy was critical to the American Revolution, which made extensive use of mass-printed propaganda like ''[[Wikipedia:Common Sense (pamphlet)|Common Sense]]''. Public education further improved these literacy rates. Democracy would gradually rise in prominence during this period thanks to increased literacy. The abolition of slavery and women's emancipation would also make serious progress during this era as an extension of the rise in literacy.

Communications technology experienced a quantum leap during this period. The first optical telegraph system was built in 1793, and the French Empire under Napoleon greatly expanded this network and made good use of its ability to transmit signals across great distances. The electrical telegraph evolved during the same time period, but the British and French initially ignored it because they thought the optical system was just fine. This didn't stop inventors from refining and perfecting the device, and the first commercial electric telegraph came online in 1837, with widespread adoption occurring shortly thereafter. Undersea cables were laid across the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific, connecting the world for the first time. Early versions of telex and fax machines used the technology as well, and then in the 1890s came Guglielmo Marconi and wireless telegraphy, which quickly became the standard comms equipment for ships and is the main reason anyone survived the sinking of the ''Titanic''. Alongside this came the discovery of radio waves, which went quickly from experimental technology to cheap, mass-produced sets. The telephone was also invented in the late 19th century.

Photography was invented in the early 1800s and perfected by the 1840s, when Louis Daguerre invented the process he so humbly named after himself. The proliferation of cheap and (relatively) easily reproduced photographic images took the world by storm. Souvenir and formal photographs became a big business, along with the much creepier death photos (since it took a few minutes to capture a photo with the daguerreotype process, some people found it easier to pose a dead person than to get a live one to sit still). Battlefield photographs from the American Civil War brought the brutality of war into the public eye for the first time. Film recording also got its start during the Industrial Revolution, with the first stroboscopic animations appearing in the 1830s and stereoscopic viewers emerging a decade later. The real revolution came when Eadweard Muybridge worked out how to display a series of static photographs as a single moving image, followed swiftly by George Eastman's invention of the first photographic film in 1884 and the development of the first motion picture cameras by Louis LePrince in 1887. Other inventors and pioneers like Emile Reynaud, Ottomar Anschütz, Robert W. Paul, the Lumiere brothers, and Georges Méliès furthered the technology and brought cinema to the masses for the first time.

Weapons technology advanced by leaps and bounds. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, the average soldier was armed with a smoothbore flintlock musket that could be shot maybe four times a minute and was accurate to a hundred yards at most. Breech-loading rifles came around very shortly into the period, though the complexity of the mechanism made large scale manufacture impossible. Guns became mass produced (and were among the first complex machines with metal mechanisms to be so), but over the early 19th century rifling became standard and switched over to percussion cap firing mechanisms and were complemented by the first mass-produced revolvers. Starting in 1848, muskets began being phased out for breech-loading rifles. Metallic cartridges and smokeless powder would arrive towards the end of this era. Since black powder would rapidly foul any repeating action, smokeless powder was critical to the function of any self-loading firearm. Machine guns made their first appearance in the 1880s with Sir Hiram Maxim's invention of his namesake gun. Self-loading pistols emerged as well. Artillery advanced from simple iron tubes firing iron balls or canister rounds straight ahead to breech-loading steel guns which fired high-explosive shells on predictable ballistic trajectories.

Of course, there was a downside. Industrialization did generate a lot of wealth, but not everyone profited from it. Rural landlords found that their fields were full of surplus farmhands who weren't needed and promptly kicked them off their land to go live in dirty overcrowded cities full of cheaply made apartments into which people were crammed like sardines. To get enough to survive, everyone in a poor family older than six would have to work in hellish, unsafe conditions for 12 hours or more, often operating dangerous machines that could maim or kill an unwary operator in the heat, dark, stink and noise of it all while their bosses [[Wikipedia:Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire|forcibly locked their workers into the building]].

There were various responses to these conditions, some of which were more extreme than others. The best-known of these is the concept of the labor union, which allowed for workers in the same industry to group together and demand better working conditions from their employers. This era also saw the rise of regulations against child labor, improved safety standards and so forth. And of course, there was the enormous amount of pollution and general environmental destruction, whose effects are coming back to bite us in the ass a little over a century later. It was a legendary problem even then; the famed "London fog" that you see in every Victorian-era depiction of the city was caused by every house and business in London burning coal for heat, kicking vast amounts of soot and pollutants into the air and generating thick, toxic smog.

==Napoleonic Wars==
{{topquote|All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.|Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, ''Why Nations Fail''}}

{{topquote|In early life he may have been a sincere republican; but he hated anarchy and disorder, and, before his campaign in Italy was over, he had begun to plan to make himself ruler of France. He worked systematically to transform the people's earlier ardor for liberty into a passion for military glory and plunder.|Willis Mason West}}

Imagine a world where Tom Cruise succeeded in killing Hitler and then Rommel proceeded to do all the conquering that Hitler promised to do except without all the genocide, only to lose it all by invading Russia in winter. Replace Hitler with Maximilien Robespierre and Rommel with Napoleon Bonaparte and that's basically the Napoleonic Wars.

France was a shit place to live if you were a peasant and always had been, but the 1790s were particularly shitty. Like "why is my bread made of sawdust" shitty (no, really, that happened). Seeing that America had done all right for itself after throwing out the [[monarchy]], a bunch of French people decided they had nothing to lose and tried the same. Things got a little [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror out of hand] as they [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre tend to in France] and before long a young military officer decided that the best course of action was to shoot some protesters with cannons, and the country loved him for it.

Now that he was in control, [[Emprah|Emperor Napoleon]] had a relatively short to-do list: Lead and shape <s>Man</s>Frenchkind <s>into a psychic race</s> and surpass the <s>Eldar</s> '''Romans''' by learning from their mistakes, unite Humanity under one aegis and allow for <s>instant</s> communication and travel <s>across all human inhabited worlds</s>, kill literally every <s>Xenos</s> Brit(is there really much of a difference?) and most importantly, prevent another calamity like the Age of Strife or Fall of the <s>Eldar</s> '''Roman Empire'''.

Five coalitions were raised against the Emperor's Great Crusade, and each was smashed to pieces by his <s>Astartes</s> '''Horse Artillery''' and the <s>Solar Auxilia</s> '''Garde Impériale'''. This went on until the Emperor was betrayed by <s>Horus</s> '''the weather'''. In the disastrous invasion of <s>Isstvan V</s> '''Russia''', the Grand Army would suffer 80% losses, many due to freezing to death.

While Napoleon would fight against two more coalitions against him, the defeat in Russia would prove to be the beginning of the end.

To fund these wars Napoleon sold the United States a '''huge''' chunk of land that's now known as the Louisiana Purchase. This was actually controversial in the United States at the time since it wasn't ''explicitly'' allowed by the Constitution of the United States. The sheer size of the acquisition surprised nearly everyone except Napoleon; the negotiators sent by President Jefferson were only looking to acquire New Orleans and access to the Mississippi. Napoleon was eager to divest himself of his New World holdings because they were more trouble than they were worth (a lesson Spain never took to heart and the British only after a very long time); this was shortly after France embarrassingly lost Haiti to the world's first (and so far only) successful large-scale slave revolt. Ultimately, the argument that the power to make treaties was sufficient to make a treaty exchanging money for land won out and American settlers soon flooded the largely undeveloped land. Another lasting consequence was that Napoleon's government offered a large reward for anyone who could develop a cost-effective method of preserving food. Nicolas Appert claimed this prize when he discovered that food cooked in sealed jars would last for a long time (even though he admittedly had no clue why it worked). This would eventually be refined into canning.

The key to Napoleons success on the battlefield was mainly due to two factors. The first was that he abolished the system of purchasing military ranks, which was the norm for all other European states at the time. It didn't matter if you never even saw a musket in your life, if you laid down 10.000 Francs, you were a General of his majesty now, congratulations. Napoleon abolished this entirely, granting ranks and the prestige that came with them exclusively through merit. If you were a compentent commander, it didn't matter how high your birth or how thick your briefcase was, you could rise all the way to the top to become of Napoleons famous Marshals (although that didn't stop Napoleon from engaging in some dubious nepotism here and there - in the end, two of his brothers ended up becoming Marshals too and his son-in-law not just a Marshal, but also King of Naples). This in turn not only guaranteed that his armies and divisions were lead by the crème dé la crème of his Generals, but also increased the morale and motivation of his troops dramatically, beyond just the patriotic fervor of the years prior. Whereas the soldiers of Russia, Prussia or Austria were mostly impoverished farmhands or unlucky vagrants, pressed into uniforms and drilled until the last vestiges of humanity were stripped away, Napoleons soldiers were proud, willing to take risks and hungry for glory and promotions.

The second was that he revolutionized logistics and offensive tactics. Napoleon can arguably even be credited with inventing the basic concept of modern maneuver warfare from whole cloth. To give some context: Armies during the tail end of the 18th century usually moved in large, single formations, which mainly served the purpose of stopping any of the aformentioned pressganged sods from deserting too early. The thought of splitting up into smaller forces didn't really occur to the strategists of that time since the sense of honour put an emphasis on big, decisive single battles with little room for skirmishes. Such a big, central force had to be upkept, so they carried a sizeable chunk of civilians with them (it wasn't unheard of that the total amount of people moving in an army were at least half of the fielded manpower): metalworkers to repair cannons, smiths to make nails and horseshoes, the actual wives and children of many soldiers in the army and also, what might seem utterly bizarre to us today, people that could only be described as tourists. Napoleon did away with the civilians in his armies entirely, keeping only a number of specialists like sappers and engineers on hand, preferring to instead aquire (yes, aquire, civilians that had their possessions lifted in this system were entitled to compensation after the fighting was over and looting was heavily punished) their supplies from the cities and countryside he marched through. This gave him a massive advantage in operational flexibility and allowed him to march quicker into advantageous positions or exploit the flanks of his enemies. Another advantage of this system was that it allowed Napoleon to split his forces up into smaller divisions and corps that had permission to act independently from the main force and when opportunity arose. A common theme of diary entries of Generals that fought against Napoleon was how he always managed to take them by surprise in places they least expected attacks from. It has to be said though that Napoleons massive skill as a micromanager was often the single part that kept this machine going; in theaters were he wasn't personally involved, it generally fell apart when less competent commanders tried to do the same and felt overwhelmed in the face of the flow of information and constant decisionmaking they had to process, like in Spain and during the retreat out of Russia.

===The War of 1812===
The young USA would engage in its own concurrent fight against the British. In 1812, the U.S. declared war on the British over press-ganging of American sailors... two days after the British put a stop to it (transatlantic communication at the time could go no faster than transatlantic ships, which took roughly two months). The official ''casus belli'' aside, the real reason the United States declared war on Britain was in retaliation for British support of Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederation and a desire to conquer Canada. Despite terrible results for the US on land, which saw the White House burned down by Canadians, the U.S. did better than expected on the naval front. Even with Napoleon tying up most of the Royal Navy, the hastily raised and underfunded U.S. Navy matching them was a serious accomplishment.

One especially notable U.S. vessel was the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_floating_battery_Demologos United States floating battery ''Demologos''] (retroactively renamed the ''Fulton'' after its creator), the first documented steam warship. However, the principle muscle of the USN was the nation's first six frigates, originally constructed to fight the Barbary pirates. Although they were relatively old ships by the start of the war, they were still well armed, sturdy, exceptionally fast for their weight and virtually cannon-proof due to their composite-armor-like hulls, built from American live oak instead of comparatively flimsy European wood. This is where USS ''Constitution'' got her nickname of "Old Ironsides"; during a battle with HMS ''Guerriere'', one of her crewmen watched shot after shot bounce off ''Constitution'''s hull like a Tau punching a Space Marine and famously shouted "Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!" After a string of high profile defeats the Royal Navy forbade their captains to engage them with less than a two-to-one advantage.

In December 1814 both sides declared peace since they weren’t getting anywhere and the original cause for the war was no longer applicable. On 8 January 1815 [sic] the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans Battle of New Orleans] was fought and ended in an overwhelming U.S. victory, despite the war already being over (see the above point of communication being slow).

==Transportation==
In 1800, if you wanted to get from point A to point B your options were limited. You could always walk, in which case you might be able to cover maybe 50 kilometers a day at 4kph if you're in good health and traveling light. Catching a lift on a farm wagon was about as fast, but it's not you doing the walking. If you had the cash, you might use a stagecoach, drawn by a team of horses which were regularly swapped out and could go along at 13-16kph if the roads were good (and that's a big If). A sailing ship might be able to match that speed if there was favorable conditions (and that was a big if) and would be on the move 24 hours a day. Most people of the period lived their whole lives without going more than 30km from their birthplace; travel was the domain of elites, the wealthy, merchants and their associates, and armies on the march. While there had been refinements (some of which were fairly substantial, especially with ships) this basic set-up had been the case since the Bronze Age. But this ancient order would soon be overturned by steam power.

First there were steamboats with experiments starting in the 1700s in Britain, France and America. It was a fairly straightforward idea: take a boat, slap a steam engine in it, hook it up to a paddle wheel and hope that nothing catches fire or blows up. By the early 1800s there were some steam tugboats. By the 1810s there were paddleboats handling cargo on canals and rivers. By the 1820s there were experimental steamships which could cross the Atlantic mostly using engine power and by the 1830s there were regular transatlantic crossings. The big advantage of a steamship over a sailboat was that it could sail straight into the wind without giving a shit. Voyages that could take months at full sail could be done in a week. Even so sailing ships still persisted for some time in some roles as they did not need their coal bunkers topped off all the time.

Self-powered ships were a big deal for maritime trade, but on land something new rolled down the lines. Steam locomotives started put hauling carts in English and coal mines, then upgraded in 1826 to moving freight and passengers. In 1829, Stephenson's Rocket managed to achieve the ''amazing'' overland speed of 48 kph. Things only escalated from there. By the 1830s, there was a full blown railway boom in the UK as rail lines snaked their way over the British Isles and their colonies. The US followed soon after, then the French and gradually the Germans, Spanish, Russians, Italians and so forth got in on the game. For the United States in particular railways shaped the cultural landscape of the country. Chicago and several other cities went from podunk towns to major cities thanks to their use as a rail hub and expansion of the rail network west was a key tool in settling the frontier. The same applied to Canada with the Canadian Pacific. The big American rail companies also became massively powerful [[Megacorporation]]s in the modern sense. In the latter of half of the century, trams and trolleys began to emerge for use inside cities, providing the forerunner to modern public transit services.

From moving Iowa grain and bananas from Havana to the European market to sparking the beginnings of tourism to the creation of the first suburbs, both steamships and railways transformed national economies and the ways people lived and worked. They also changed warfare. Steamships could easily outmaneuver and outrun pure sailing vessels; on land trains could easily move soldiers and supplies in huge numbers.

This was also the time when humanity first took to the air. The first hot-air balloons appeared in the late 18th century and were gradually refined. In 1852 the French built a hydrogen balloon with a small steam engine, allowing the operator to move it about as he wished. Further experiments were made through the latter half of the 19th century with lighter than air flight. At the same time, inventors began to work with gliders to achieve heavier than air flight. Despite the claims of a few derpy dorks forever consigned to be laughingstocks that heavier than air flight was impossible for humans, the Wright Brothers managed to achieve powered flight in 1903.

==Meiji Revolution ==
{{topquote|智識ヲ世界ニ求メ大ニ皇基ヲ振起スべシ (Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.)|Meiji Charter Oath}}
[[Image:Meiji era Train.jpg|Railways come to the land of the Rising Sun, memorialized in Woodcut|thumb|right|300px]]
During the Age of Exploration, Japan had closed its borders to most of the outside world to prevent foreign influence (even going so far as to kill castaways, missionaries and their converts - even Japanese sailors who were rescued by foreign ships were prevented from returning home), and for a time, the Shogunate was successful in preventing Europeans from encroaching on Japan like they had in so many other parts of the world. This came to a crashing halt over 200 years later on the 8th of July 1853. The USS ''Mississippi'' and some other American ships arrived in Edo to deliver a message from US President (at the time of the Mississippi's departure) Millard Fillmore requesting the reopening of trade. The ''Mississippi'' and its companions returned on the 12th of February 1854 and led to the Convention of Kanagawa in March (funny enough, Fillmore's term in office was over before this). There were other developments like the British bombing a port in revenge for a murdered businessman, said port's rulers in the Satsuma domain agreeing to pay reparations by buying warships, having been thoroughly impressed by their firepower, the assassination of the Shogun's number two Ii Naosuke and an attempt to burn the Imperial Palace. This led to a weakening of the ruling Shogunate that allowed Emperor Meiji to seize back power in the violent but swift Boshin War in 1868, permanently ending the Shogunate and the feudal system that had ruled Japan for centuries. The die-hard Shogunate loyalists briefly declared a Republic but they were defeated at Hakodate in the final weeks of the war. One of the foremost Imperial samurai and part of the ruling triumvirate under the Emperor, Saigo Takamori, led his home domain of Satsuma into a brief rebellion after disagreeing with some of the reforms and the triumvirate falling apart with one of them dying of illness and Saigo being rivals with the other guy. During the Battle of Shiroyama Saigo's last charge, mortal wounding and assisted seppuku, followed by the final charge of his 50 remaining followers marked the end of the samurai in the face of conscripted peasants with rifles and cannons. With the last of the big three being assassinated by ex-samurai after the Rebellion, ironically not far from where Naosuke had been shot and decapitated, it was over.

The new Meiji government, not wanting to be consumed and dismembered by the Western powers as many other Asian countries already had, undertook a rapid adoption of Western technology and, eventually, started doing some empire building of its own. On the one hand, the fact that a formerly isolated nation could go from a feudal backwater to a competitive modern nation in just a scant few decades was remarkable. On the other hand, the need to maintain Japan's power to prevent Western imperialism from getting all up in their shit directly led to Japan's own growing military autocracy. Military success against China in 1894, and against Russia in 1905 combined to put Japan on the world stage. The latter conflict especially put the West on notice; everyone had expected Russia to curb-stomp the Japanese, only for the Japanese to kick the shit out of the Russians on land and win an absolutely crushing victory at sea in the Battle of Tsushima. Nearly the entire Russian fleet was wiped out in exchange for three Japanese gunboats and a handful of casualties, one of whom was future admiralissimo Isoroku Yamamoto (he lost two fingers to a bit of shrapnel and would have been discharged if he'd lost a third). The architect of this grand victory, Admiral Heihachiro Togo, was celebrated as a national hero, and his flagship ''Mikasa'' is preserved as a museum in Yokosuka. While the samurai as a class lost their traditional power of free money and being able to execute disrespectful peasants, enough of them saw the writing on the wall that they found positions in the new order, using the wealth and education that their families had accumulated to enter politics, the military academy, or found many modern institutions one would recognize today, such as Mitsubishi.

==The American Civil War==
{{topquote|We are [[Grimdark|not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people]], and [[Exterminatus|must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war]].|William Tecumseh Sherman preparing to [[Rip and Tear|go absolutely fucking scorched earth]]}}

The American Civil War is one of those subjects that we could write a shit ton about, but one we could never do the due diligence to be 100% accurate to the events. Needless to say, this is our humble attempt to cover the subject. If nothing else, just know it wasn't about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy| States Rights.]

Shortly after achieving independence, a distinction between the newly United States became more and more pressing. The southern colonies had been settled by men who wanted to make a lot of money in the New World and who set up plantations manned by slaves growing tobacco and cotton. The desire to present a united front in the writing of the constitution comprimised with the slave states in giving them extra political power a la the 3/5ths compromise, where somewhere around 60% of the black population counted towards a seat in the House of Representatives. Of course, they wouldn't dare let the people who are giving them more power from sharing said power except by making money. The northern colonies were settled by groups who wanted to recreate England (or their ideal version thereof) where the cash crops grown on plantations were not profitable and to whom slavery increasingly became morally repugnant and was perceived as economically unfair.

There was some hope that slavery was on its way out at first (many of the Founding Fathers had believed that the growth of industrialization and the declining price of tobacco would make slavery obsolete and thus left the problem for future generations to solve), and then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made it much easier to process cotton and allowed for the vast expansion of cotton plantations, leading the slave owners to become very wealthy and invest their profits in buying more slaves to pick more cotton. Even those who did not profit directly from slavery still supported the institution, if only because they were terrified of the possibility of a slave revolt or an outright race war, as had been the case in Haiti just a few decades prior.

There was also a growing sense of abolitionism in the North. The British had shut down their transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery in 1833, with France following in 1848. While the number of hard-line abolitionists in the North was comparatively small, they were making headway and there were various groups opposed to slavery to various degrees. Tensions rose gradually in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, from "mere" outright brawls in the United States Senate to the "Bleeding Kansas" incident, to John Brown's attempted slave revolt at Harper's Ferry. This led to the Southern states attempting to create new slave states as fast as possible and other ploys which spiraled things out until South Carolina decided to secede, and James Buchanan refusing to do anything because he sympathized with the southern cause. Fearing that "The Peculiar Institution" would be contained, constrained, and eventually brought to inevitable extinction, the powers that be in the South pushed for a violent breakaway. This in spite of the fact that Lincoln had historically sought compromise as opposed to taking a hard line on the issue, something that changed as the war progressed.

This war is notable for being the most destructive conflict to take place within the United States, killing 700,000 and leveling several cities, and was among one of the biggest wars that was fought between industrial powers up to that point. One reason for this is that the North simultaneously held that South never left the US and that a total war with intentional targeting of the civilian population and infrastructure was OK. Another was a fear among the North that if the war was not won quickly (regardless of cost in lives) public opinion on it would sour, Lincoln would lose reelection and the war might end without the South's defeat.

The war consisted broadly of two halves, cleanly divided by the Battle of Gettysburg. The first half was characterized by a series of grand maneuver battles in the east in which the Confederates tended to win on account of all the more competent, professional generals picked their side, most notably the [[skub|legendary]] [[tactical genius]] Robert E. Lee, while the Union had to make do with politicians, corrupt hacks, and old men left over from the War of 1812. Morale was also an important factor; the Confederates tended to be on the average much more motivated, as they were carried by a deep belief that they were fighting a defensive war, something that was amplified in Confederate propaganda. The Union forces, on the other hand were mostly comprised of poor sods from the slums of New English cities like New York that couldn't afford the 100 dollars(12 bucks today) to rid themselves of being conscripted. In some other cases, soldiers were recruited straight from the ships that carried numerous European immigrants, and among these the Irish were the most prominent. A vicious cycle ensued where every moron Lincoln gave command to would boldly set out to conquer Richmond and end the war in one stroke, only to run into Lee playing tower defense on the most unfair terrain available. Union Commander of the Month would furiously throw men at Lee's lines until the grumbling from the ranks started to sound mutinous (Fredericksburg, Manassas, the Peninsula) or just stare at his lines until getting blindsided outta fucking nowhere, usually by Stonewall Jackson (Chambersburg, Chancellorsville, Second Manassas).

Either way, it'd end with the Union sulking back to Washington with about 2/3rds the army they started with. This would repeat several times until eventually Lee got cocky and tried the same thing (Gettysburg and technically Antietam although that was more of a really bloody draw). By the time of Gettysburg, there were Union soldiers (the remnants of the 2nd Maine for example) who could accurately claim to [[Fail|have gone 0 for 11 against the Army of Northern Virginia]]. At Gettysburg, however, shit went sideways for the Confederates in a big way. General Meade, a halfway competent general, was finally in charge on the Union side, Stonewall Jackson was dead, Jeb Stuart took his cavalry off on a pointless ride to nowhere, the Army of the Potomac found and occupied some of the best defensive terrain of the war, and the Army of Northern Virginia couldn't lever them out of it despite two days of very bloody fighting. This culminated in Lee picking out some of his best divisions and ordering them to charge up the middle of the Union position, supported by all his artillery. The Union army sat and waited for the the Confederates to finish shooting, then chewed the attacking divisions up with volley fire and artillery like a Carnifex brood tearing through Imperial conscripts. The attack actually breached the Union line, but was smashed and driven back with heavy casualties. The point the Confederates reached on Cemetery Hill is now known as the high-water mark of the Confederacy.
[[Image:ShermansMarch.jpg|[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufSGd58gjAM M-i-c, k-e-y, m-o-u-s-e. Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?]|thumb|right|250px]]
However, the Western Theater was a different story; a pair of grimdark badasses named Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were leading the Union on a steady slog of wins up and down the Mississippi River system. Though there were some touch and go moments, such as at Shiloh, Grant kept his head and his command and ultimately masterminded the successful Vicksburg campaign, which saw him outflank the city after ordering his fleet to do a balls-out run past its defensive batteries before bitchslapping the Confederate defenders back into their trenches and settling in for a siege that lasted until 4 July 1863, the day after Pickett's Charge was shot to pieces at Gettysburg. Losing Vicksburg and New Orleans cut the Confederacy in half and gave the Union unchallenged control of the entire Mississippi, the most important interior waterway in the country. After Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln scented blood in the air, decided he just wanted to win and didn't care how messy it got, and so gave Grant command of the Army of the Potomac. Grant knew that the Union had more men and more equipment, and if he couldn't outmaneuver Lee, he was perfectly content to [[Imperial Guard|win by attrition]]. Grant sent Sherman rampaging through Georgia like an [[Eversor]] with flamers, and then settled in for a year of meatgrinder trench warfare with Lee that was basically just World War One without biplanes and machine guns.

It has to be noted: Grant was not just a "mindless butcher". He had terrible casaulty figures to be sure, but there were reasons for this: One is that Grant had noticed that the Confederates kept beating the Union by whipping them, then waiting to recover, then repeat. So the only real way to deny this to the Confederacy and especially Lee was to keep fighting and keep Lee's Army reeling, preventing any real reinforcement or supply to restore the lost men and material. Grant was bold, and displayed excellent leadership characteristics and a coolness under pressure. So cool, that part of the reason for his victory in the Wilderness campaign was because Lee lost his cool and flung men at a position and expected them to win the day. Yeah, Lee had a habit of this, and it's part of the reason that his reputation as a "tactical genius" is [[skub|hotly debated]] to this day.

While the war was started over the issue of slavery, complete emancipation was not one of the North's original war aims. However, as more Southern territory fell to the Union advance, thousands of slaves came into the custody of the Union army, either by being liberated directly or by making a break for it as soon as the bluecoats were close enough. This became troublesome in the latter years of the war, as it presented the Northern generals with a serious logistical and humanitarian challenge: feed not only a fighting army on the move, but their ever-growing train of liberated slaves. This problem was particularly acute for [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman%27s_March_to_the_Sea Sherman's March to the Sea]. Some Union generals addressed this problem by offering enlistment to liberated slaves, although this practice was not universal. However, many slaves fled Confederate territory to join up with Union forces and a good number of them ended up serving in the Union Army, including the legendary 54th Massachusetts. Ending slavery not only became political policy, but also a weapon of war since it destroyed the Confederacy's economy. This led to the Emancipation Proclamation, issued after Gettysburg, and eventually the postwar adoption of the 13th Amendment and with it the abolition of slavery. The vileness of slavery became more known as Union soldiers saw firsthand the plantations and what it did to the black people, and while some didn't give a shit or even thought it was only natural, there were plenty who saw that shit and resolved to send the Confederates straight to hell for it.

==The American Frontier==
{{topquote|You have died of dysentery.|''The Oregon Trail''}}
Throughout the mid 1800s Americans spread rapidly westward. This was aided by several large land purchases such as the aforementioned Lousiana Purchase; this was a huge step for the young nation as they now had a major highway (The Mississippi River) linking the entire back country from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico. But said expansion would only accelerate after a little incident south of the border where American settlers living in the Texas territory got fed up with the Mexican government and seceded the entire territory north of the Rio Grande. Texas joined the Union and Mexico gave up a bunch of land after getting its ass kicked. This led the United States to stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Fueling this was several gold rushes and a series of Homestead Acts, which gave ownership of land for free if you lived on it and maintained it. Canada also had a western frontier at the same time, but that part isn't nearly as well remembered (Did you play Yukon Trail? Did you even know it existed?). Huge waves of settlers were eager to reach the newly claimed California and Oregon territories, but before any railroads were laid down, they had to travel by wagon through the barren and hostile wilderness in between, with many would-be settlers dying to disease, hypothermia, hyperthermia, attacks from upset Native American tribes, and in at least one infamous case, [[Wikipedia:Donner_Party|cannibalism]].

This era has long been dramatized to the point it has become its own genre, the Western. This goes so far back ''[[Wikipedia:The Great Train Robbery (1903 film)|The Great Train Robbery]]'', one of the first films with a narrative '''ever''', was a western. Westerns dramatized the "Wild" West as a chaotic wasteland full of bandits and savages where a man would be killed for any or no reason, but historically this was not the case. Statistically the west was actually very peaceful outside of the wars, especially compared to cities out east. The big outlaws, shootouts and murders were simply very publicized '''because''' they were unusual. Still, many of these more famous incidents showed how loose the power of the law was out in the frontier, as in several cases, you had several figures who had been on both sides of the law (Billy the Kid’s Regulators, Wyatt Earp’s revenge ride, etc) usually due to conflicting interests between locally powerful factions.

==The Unification of Germany==
{{topquote|The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.|Otto von Bismarck about the unification of Germany}}

One of the aftereffects of Napoleon's brief stint into making France the all-encompassing superpower of Europe was that he motivated quite a lot of people to identify themselves with their nation instead of families or rulers. The place where this nascent idea of nationalism reverberated the most were the German states, which had been notorious for their disunity since the age of Charlemagne. Liberal and nationalist ideas that sought to unify Germany into one nation ultimately culminated in a series of revolutions that all failed until Prussia, under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck (a man with a political genius as massive as his mustache), kicked the Austrians out of the German territories and won a war against France in 1871.

The Franco-Prussian War, incidentally, had not a lot to do with Germany in itself. The southern German states (Hesse, Württemberg, Baden and Bavaria) that were still independent from Prussia at this point, leaned towards Austria. Instead it was about... Spain. Spain? What does fucking Spain have to do with Germany? Well Spain had a lot of issues at the time, the most pressing of which that it was a colonial power with no monarchy; their previous queen had been removed from power by a coup. After [[Blam|order had been restored]], the question remained whose dynasty should ascend to the Spanish throne. One of the proposed candidates was Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a scion of a branch of the Prussian royal family that remained Catholic. France was very paranoid about being outmaneuvered by the Germans and sought to prevent that, but Bismarck carefully manipulated a series of events, including the careful redacting and publication of a diplomatic telegram to make it seem as if the French had pressured the Prussian King to withdraw Leopold's candidacy for the Spanish throne (when in reality Leopold had already declined to Wilhelm) to lure France into a war with Prussia and the German states. [[Just as planned|And it worked.]] The South Germans were outraged, and the French found themselves faced with a Hobson's choice: either they could go to war or suffer severe diplomatic embarrassment at home and abroad. The following conflict saw the French being thoroughly curbstomped within eight months as the Prussians outmaneuvered and outgunned them again and again. Massive conscription after the majority of professional soldiers fell into Prussian captivity at Metz and Sedan did little to alleviate the problems. To add insult to injury, the Germans proclaimed their new Empire in Versailles, the old seat of the French kings, driving a wedge between France and Germany that would not be overcome until the 1960s.

The unification of Germany marked a massive shift in the balance of the European powers. The weakest power in the European concert (Prussia) suddenly became the strongest on the continent, with a massive population, a disciplined and modern army that ground every enemy it faced into the dirt like they were nothing, and a huge industrial base that was kicked into overdrive once the multitude of national barriers between the small German dukedoms were abolished (also helped by the reparations France had to pay to the Germans as well as the capture of Alsace-Lothringia and its rich deposits of ore). It grew so fast and rapidly that only in the span of 30 years, it managed to surpass the production levels of steel and coal of every other imperial power in the world and singlehandedly pioneered large-scale industrial chemical production with inventions like the Haber process for synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen (invaluable and irreplaceable in anything that has to do with anorganic chemistry, like most of the fertilizers used in contemporary farming). In general the German Empire was at the forefront of what's called the "Second Industrial Revolution" of the late 19th century.

The Germans, being late to the party as far as imperialism was concerned, wanted a piece of that big fat colonial cake that they felt were owed and used their industrial and military leverage to apply massive pressure to the rest of Europe. This, combined with the inherent semi-feudal social order that had persisted in Prussia since the 1600s and the rampant militarism of German society, created a very aggressive nationalist machismo which ultimately contributed a lot to the crisis that led to World War One with all of its cataclysmic consequences. Nearly all negative stereotypes people associate with Germany to this day, like militarism, brutishness, blind obedience, lack of humour, strict workplace discipline, punctuality, and being unemotional come from this particular era. The culture that this attitude bred eventually led to the mindset that gave rise to the Nazis after Germany's defeat in World War I and only started to fizzle out after the old elites of the German Empire were permanently removed from power after World War II forced the Germans to reinvent themselves and their nation.

== The British Empire ==
{{British}}
{{topquote|On her dominions the sun never sets; before his evening rays leave the spires of Quebec, his morning beams have shone three hours on Port Jackson, and while sinking from the waters of Lake Superior, his eye opens upon the Mouth of the Ganges.|The Caledonian Mercury}}
[[image:British Empire 1921.png|thumb|left|400px|“C" is for colonies
Rightly we boast
that of all the great nations
Great Britain has most!"- Mrs Ernest Ames, An ABC for Baby Patriots]]

Remember the British East India Company from the [[Age of Enlightenment]]? Well, eventually Britain decided to drop the pretense that it was merely an English corporation that was building colonies everywhere and just owned the fact that, yes, they were trying to take over the world. They hadn't been the only ones; the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Germans, Russians, and several American presidents were as well, and near the end Japan would try to get in on the action.

The Napoleonic Wars had left the British in the enviable position of having the world's biggest, baddest navy. This was a title they would hold until the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and the massive debts the British had racked up during WWI led them to conceded that they would have to be okay with the US Navy equaling them in size. They would lose it entirely after the Second World War, due to the tremendous debts of fighting that war piled on top of the previous one.

Having a massive navy at its disposal meant that the British could effectively dictate terms to anyone within sight of the sea. This persuasion was not solely political strong-arming, but also took the form of general peacekeeping and anti-slavery operations with the West Africa Squadron alone freeing hundreds of thousands of slaves and largely shutting down the Atlantic Triangle. At its height the British Empire had founded colonies or established protectorates on almost every major landmass on Earth, and had presences at the key maritime choke points of Gibraltar, the Suez, the Cape of Good Hope, Singapore, and the Falklands near Cape Horn. It was said that "The sun never sets on the British Empire," which is still technically true due to the existence of the Pitcairn Islands.

=== The Crimean War ===
The Crimean War is one of those wars that tends to be forgotten about by non-history buffs, but its effects on the world were out of all proportion to its relatively short duration (October 1853-February 1856). This was the war that gave us [[Wikipedia:Florence Nightingale|Florence Nightingale]], [[Wikipedia:Charge of the Light Brigade|the Charge of the Light Brigade]], the [[Wikipedia:Victoria Cross|Victoria Cross]], and the [[Wikipedia:Government reforms of Alexander II of Russia|Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II]]. It was also one of the first conflicts to see widespread use of high-explosive shells, telegraphs, railways, and photography; in some senses it can therefore be considered the first modern war.

The war was ostensibly started over the treatment of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, but in reality it was all about the balance of power in Europe. The Ottoman Empire was in the middle of its long collapse, and Russia was taking the opportunity to flex its muscles in Central Europe. Britain wasn't thrilled by the prospect of Turkey being conquered by Russia, and Napoleon III needed a show of strength abroad to strengthen his position at home. When the Ottomans asked for changes to the agreement on their treatment of Orthodox Christians, Russia threw a fit and declared war. The British, French, and eventually the Italians sided with the Ottomans. At first, the fighting was bloody and inconclusive, with the Russians mauling the Ottomans at the Battle of Sinop and laying siege to Kars but being stopped at Silistra. The British and French promptly sent ships and troops through the Dardanelles into the Black Sea and invaded the Crimea. This is where the Battle of Balaclava and the Siege of Sevastopol took place. Balaclava became famous for the [[Wikipedia:The Thin Red Line (Battle of Balaclava)|"Thin Red Line"]] of the 93rd Highlanders and the [[Wikipedia:Charge of the Light Brigade|Charge of the Light Brigade]]. The Siege was a badly managed, yearlong slog that killed thousands of troops on both sides and wound up killing the British army commander, Lord Raglan, who'd been catching hell in the press since Balaclava and was even more depressed that the Russians were holding out for so long. Ultimately the mounting casualty figures and apparent pointlessness of the whole thing led Britain and France to call for peace negotiations, the outcome of which saw Russia and Turkey handing back the territories they'd captured and Russia losing the right to base ships in the Black Sea. Russia's defeat was seen as a national humiliation and led directly to the Great Reforms of Alexander II. Among other things, he abolished serfdom in the Empire, modernized the military, relaxed press censorship, and reformed the justice and educational systems. Most of these reforms were rolled back by reactionary conservatives after Alexander was assassinated in 1881, which led to increasing unrest in the country's radical underground and may have ultimately contributed to the Russian Revolution in 1917. On the flipside, the British got the lasting cultural legacy of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale. Horrified by the reports of wounded British soldiers being treated in atrocious conditions, Florence rolled up her sleeves, went to the Crimea with some of her friends, and effectively invented the modern nursing profession while also pushing for reforms in sanitation that greatly reduced death rates in the field hospitals and would later be implemented throughout India and Britain.

Also led to the birth of the Red Cross and the first Geneva Convention.

=== The Indian Mutiny ===
In 1853 the cost of rifling had come down enough that the British could transition from smoothbore firearms supplemented by specialist riflemen, both using the slow and relatively unreliable flintlock system, to standardizing on a rifled, percussion-cap weapon, resulting in the 1853 Enfield. Like many firearms of this era, it was loaded via cartridges consisting of the powder and ball in a sealed paper sleeve. The rifle was loaded by tearing open the cartridge (often by biting it), pouring in the powder, and ramming in the ball. This significant arms upgrade eventually reached India. In 1857 rumors (which were never proven) developed that the cartridges were coated with animal fats including beef tallow and pork lard, pissing off the Hindu and Muslim natives. This proved to the final straw for a long-brewing rebellion. Shortly into the Mutiny, the mutineers at Cawnpore slaughtered women and children who had surrendered. This proved to be a PR disaster for the rebels, killing any claim they had to legitimacy or the moral high ground and enraging the British public enough to warrant a very strong response. One important note is that the mutiny was not total (in fact, the conflict was mostly contained to Bengal), and many colonial troops fought against the mutineers, particularly Sikhs who had no prohibitions on pork or beef and were keen on the idea of getting to kill Hindus and Muslims. The conflict would lead to the effective end of the British East India Company in favor of direct rule (the "British Raj"), which was generally a serious improvement in conditions for Indians if you continued to ignore the lack of influence they had over how they would be ruled.

While relatively short (a year and a half), there was little lull in the action and there are a lot of firsthand accounts one can look through to get an understanding of combat in the era. Of particular note is the several accounts of rebels being shot multiple times with a revolver but living long enough to kill or seriously injure men with their swords, which remain important in any consideration of knife vs. gun. One officer even managed to kill ~10 rebels with a ''spear'' by funneling them through a narrow doorway.

As a side note, the rifle at the center of this would eventually be exported to the Confederate States of America (see above) in large numbers, which after its defeat would then be sold surplus to the post-Sakoku Japanese government (see above again).

=== The Boer Wars ===
During the Napoleonic Wars the British gained control of every Dutch colony, and while they handed most of them back afterwards, they decided the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa was too good to let go, so they bought it. [[Rape|The Dutch weren't in a position to refuse the offer]]. A long series of disputes arising from this eventually escalated into a war between the Dutch-descended Boers and the British colonials (the Africans in the region were smart enough to know that they were kinda screwed no matter who won). Both wars were disasters for the British (even though they eventually won the second through overwhelming force) thanks to using Napoleonic tactics in an era of rifled repeating firearms. This was even worse in the first war since the British had not yet ditched their iconic red uniforms. Even after they got wise and switched to khaki, things didn't improve in the early stages of the Second Boer War as Redvers Buller, in charge on behalf of Garnet Wolseley, proved an unmitigated failure, losing battle after battle. After Buller got fired and replaced by Wolseley's rival Frederick Roberts (which caused the British army to basically split in two thanks to tensions between Wolseley's African colonial veterans and Roberts and his Indian troops), the Brits won on the field and the Boers resorted to an insurgency which was brutally suppressed (by which we mean the term "concentration camp" was literally invented here). Adding insult to injury, Roberts replaced Wolseley as Commander-in-Chief after the war.

The Boer Wars have been largely forgotten except by military historians due to their [[The World Wars|foreshadowing of things to come]]. One thing that has survived into the present day is the term "commando", which originally referred to the organization of the Boer forces during the wars and acquired its modern usage due to their unorthodox (for the time) tactics this organization enabled.

==Notes==
*This was the era where Europeans, and the nations descended from them, truly and unquestionably ruled the world. Their head-start in industrialization, advanced military and civilian technology, the vast accumulated wealth from previous centuries, and advanced medicine and agriculture gave them an advantage that any other culture at the time was incapable of overcoming. With that came a lot of nastiness. You see, the notion that people not born with a silver spoon up their arses were worth more than their value as meatshields or manual laborers hadn't caught on yet, and this went double for foreigners. The ruthlessness and blatant disregard for human life with which the imperial powers of the time exploited the people they ruled over caused widespread resentment and led to a long series of uprisings, some more successful than others. Later down the line this exploitation triggered the decolonization movement and the brutal struggle of the underclasses for equal rights and humane treatment (which continue to this day).
*The agricultural revolution, where machines and other modern technology were applied to farming, accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the former fed the latter by allowing enough food to be produced that the majority of workers could take factory jobs instead of agricultural work. Additionally, the invention of the Haber-Bosch-process made the large-scale production of anorganic fertilizer from atmopheric nitrogen possible, turning landscapes that were previously thought of as unsuitable for any kind of farming into lush gardens. This earned Fritz Haber, its inventor, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1919 (at the time a very controversial decision, as Haber also provided his expertise to the German war effort and among other things invented ammonium nitrate as a substitute for TNT and the first chemical weapons to be used in WWI.)
* Several technologies supported the process of industrialization. Steam power helped kick things off by revolutionizing manufacturing and transportation, but two others were also important. Large machinery and tall buildings required steel to become cheap enough that it could be made on a massive scale. Historically, making good-quality steel was a time-consuming process that needed the careful attention of expert craftsmen. This changed with the invention of the Bessemer process, wherein bellows would be used to blast hot air directly into the molten iron to get it hot enough to smelt out impurities. Electricity also helped tremendously, allowing for much longer working cycles through lightbulbs and improved communications through telegraph and radio.
*The invention of vapor-compression cycle cooling was also a major innovation of this era, although until electricity became widely available its use was mostly constrained to steam-powered dairies in cities. This allowed for much denser and heavily mechanized industrial centers, as well greater population in warmer areas. The flush toilet and toilet paper also originated at this time.
*Vulcanized rubber arose during this era. While important for sealing and tires, one major change this facilitated was in clothing. The elastic waistband brought about modern undergarments among other things. The first plastics were invented in the 1860s, but these early plastics were brittle and had few practical uses, so the true rise of plastics would not be till the era of [[The World Wars]] and [[The Cold War|and beyond]].
*Food preservation made large advances. For most of human history, food preservation had been limited to drying (through methods including salt, smoke and/or sugar), pickling and (in climates that allowed it) freezing, all of which originated in the [[Bronze Age]] at the latest. Now methods like jarring and canning food emerged (though early sealing methods turned out to be toxic themselves), along with serious improvements to old methods like like quick freezing, the electric icemaker/freezer/refrigerator (domestic versions won't appear till the interwar period though), freeze-drying, and spray-drying, led to food that took up much less space while having lifespans measured in ''years''. These methods continue to be refined in [[Post-Cold War|the current era]], largely through new materials and understanding of microscopic organisms.
**To add to that, the invention of beef extract by the German chemist Justus von Liebig revolutionized the way food could be produced at larger scales at lower cost. It served as the catalyst for the invention of most modern processed foods and the birth of large scale food factories, where cheap food could be produced to feed an ever increasing amount of mouths, further accelerating the population boom that coincided with the improvement of healthcare as outlined below.
*The invention of modern medicine, which arguably started with the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis' research into childbed fever (a dangerous infection of the uterus through bacteria that enter the body after giving birth), delivered the modern template of how medical research is conducted. Combined with the with the first proof of how bacteria cause sickness through the German doctor Robert Koch and the subsequent triumph of medical hygiene, this newfound understanding of illnesses and plagues that had decimated entire civilizations in the millennia before led to a huge increase in birth rates and life expectancy for every human on the planet. As a result, the world population increased rapidly, starting in the 1850s, a trend that peaked in the 1960s and is continuously decreasing ever since (not that bad of a thing as one might think, with climate change, limited resources and all)
*The Scramble for Africa begins in 1881 and ends in 1914. Almost all modern "explorer" cliches and imagery began here; think Theodore Roosevelt's misadventures, Dr. Stanley Livingston of "I presume?" fame, or the Indiana Jones movies. The two main exceptions, the American frontiersman in his coonskin cap and breastplate-clad Spanish conquistador, are both strongly linked to a specific type and time instead of explorers in general. The stereotype of the great white hunter/explorer wearing a pith helmet, binoculars, and khaki overalls while hacking his way through the jungle with a big-ass knife in one hand and an elephant gun in the other started here.
*Human flight was first achieved in this era. In 1783 the first air balloon flight took place, and was first put to military use in 1794. The Wright Flyer took flight in late 1903, marking the first heavier than air flying machine. Zeppelins became practical just before World War I.
* Naval technology went through multiple revolutions. The wooden sailing ships of the Napoleonic Wars gave way to ironclad tallships with steam and sail propulsion, only to be replaced in turn by warships built entirely from steel. The famous duel of the ''Merrimack'' and the ''Monitor'' marked the end of wooden warships, the appearance of the steam launch ''Turbinia'' led to a transition to turbine engines, and HMS ''Dreadnought'' heralded the modern battleship. The first military submarines appeared in the American Revolution and Civil War, although the concept wouldn't be perfected until the Great War.
* The beginnings of feminism started in the 19th century, as women began to lobby for more access to their countries' social, political, and economic spheres. They scored some notable successes. In 1861, property-owning women in Victoria Australia could vote in local elections. In 1890 women gained the full franchise (but could not run for office) in New Zealand, while in 1893 full female suffrage was permitted in Colorado and 1902 saw federal suffrage in the new Commonwealth of Australia. By the late 19th century, the academic profession was opened up to women. It was still pretty damn sexist, but things were in motion.
* The Victorians (or at least those who could afford to do so) went in for elaborate periods of mourning. Not just a wake, funeral, and a catered lunch in formal wear while a funeral home gouges the family, or even sitting shiva for a week. A widow mourning her dear departed hubby was expected to wear black clothing and a veil, put up black ornamentation and wear black jewelry, and act reserved and solemn and so forth for a year. A lot of what we associate with death, mourning and similar subjects has its origins here.
* Holiday travel and mass tourism also became a thing here. Though medieval peasants had gotten lots of days off for religious reasons, they typically didn't have much to do or anywhere to go on those days off, being as they were medieval peasants. Rich people, of course, had always been able to travel pretty much anywhere they liked, which had led to the rise of the "Grand Tour", wherein young men (and occasionally women) of means would dick around Europe for a few months or years while receiving a classical education, taking in the local culture, and getting laid. The proliferation of railways, steamships, and middle-class jobs made travel a practicable concept for the masses for the first time, so that by the 1870s an average middle-class family could go to the country or the seaside for a vacation or even travel abroad on a package tour. The Grand Tour persisted for a while after this, thanks to ''nouveau riche'' Americans taking up the practice, but ultimately it fell out of favor as enthusiasm for classical culture declined.

==The appeal of the Industrial Revolution==
This era produced many things modern people take for granted and have difficulty considering life without. The rise of film and audio recording during this era and mass printing of advertisement and newspapers during this era mean there is no shortage of records of daily life, so this era is fairly well understood. Of particular note is that the late 1800s printed mail order catalogs started being printed, and these now provide quality information on everyday items, complete with cost and illustrations, that simply don't exist in earlier eras. Those researching earlier eras for this kind of thing have to go through the rare surviving records of estate sales, government orders and business transactions to get a ''fraction'' the understanding a layman can obtain from viewing a simple public domain catalog. These have proven such good resources some historically set RPGs outright say to find catalogs from companies like Bannerman (A surplus arms dealer so successful he built a castle on a private island next to West Point as an advertisement, since everyone traveling the Hudson had to see the sign on it), Montgomery Ward, and Sears Roebuck to fill in the blanks of the equipment list. Before this period, historians were mostly concerned with Big Things: wars, generals, kings, nobles, priests and the occasional artist, merchant, architect, engineer or inventor thrown in, often because there was so few records of the common man. In the Industrial Revolution historians became able and willing to adequately research the way people lived their lives day to day, from well-to-do merchants and skilled tradesmen to factory workers to scavengers picking through garbage for bones, rages, scraps of metal and dog turds to sell.

The Industrial Revolution allowed for inventors to not only create meaningful new creations, but see them become common overnight. [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Before the Industrial Revolution changes generally happened slowly with various small tweaks on things and methods, the compilation of said tweaks rolling over and the occasional breakthrough like the water wheel or gunpowder every once and a while which would take centuries to come into it's own]]. A peasant would assume that his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren would till the soil just as he did with what changes that did happen in his lifetime being largely minor stuff that tweaked the board but did not change the game. Industrialization changed all that, lives were changed for better or worse by mechanization suddenly and totally. Progress became an idea that would drive the world, even if problems were also mounting. People came to understand that the past was not just the present which happened beforehand and the future could be more than just more of the same. It's not surprising that science fiction started up in the 19th century, as did horror: Jules Verne, HG Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe were all active writers of the era.

This time was also one of upheaval socially and politically. Before the Industrial Revolution people generally operated on the idea that one should "Know One's Station", that society was divided into classes that were (with various degrees of legal formality enforcing this) hereditary, static and instead of trying to get out of them they should stay in them, stay out of the affairs of people of other classes and obey their betters. If you were a peasant you'd work for your lord, obey his orders, treat him with reverence as a higher form of human, be jolly grateful to have such a man as your master and avoid thinking about all that politics stuff which is none of your business. While this had not died out in the Industrial Revolution (see all of England's class stuff), it was on the decline both from gradual erosion and active resistance.

The source of wealth shifted from farms and fields to factories and companies which the merchant classes/bourgeois now owned. To be a noble you needed a peerage at least (in England that is, the rest of Europe, especially Spain and Germany remained static feudal societies at heart, while the French and eventually the Russians abolished it in a literally cutthroat fashion) and preferably a dozen generations of pedigree which your fellow nobs would respect even if you were broke, to be a captain of industry you just needed a lot of money invested in the right companies. It was possible for a poor man to rise to the highest echelons of society in the Industrial Revolution, see Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. The downside of it was that these rich buggers tended to view the poor which could not rise from rags (ignoring of course how most of these ''nouveau riche'' then made it as difficult as possible for anyone to actually join their ranks) as being lazy incompetents that were only fit for ruthless exploitation and that attempting to help them out (beyond providing them with just enough education for them to do whatever work the rich needed them to do and healthy enough to keep working) was not only useless, but an active evil in the long term since it meant only more of them in the long run. To quote Charles Dickens' ''A Christmas Carol'':

''"Many cannot go there [Workhouses and Prisons] and many would rather die."''

''“If they'd rather die, they'd better do it and decrease the surplus population."''

The Industrial Revolution people had oppressive rigid order and stability swapped out for opportunities to excel and thrive or crash and burn. You could be born dirt poor and rise to riches, or you might start out as a skilled tradesmen who ends up as just another disposable factory worker.

That attitude about the poor went doubly so for the colonial subjects and non-white people in general. In 1876 there was a drought which led to crop failure in much of India, instead of importing food to feed the affected masses (which they'd done not long before successfully) the Raj Government allowed merchants to stockpile grain and sell it abroad to drive the price up. The result was famine and starvation which killed 6-10 million people. [[Grimdark|The Belgians in the Congo Free State made this look saintly by comparison.]]

Such treatment of the working class, combined with the belief that since the working class were the actual producers of wealth they should be the ones with the right to decide how the machines and materials used to make said wealth were used, would lead to Karl Marx writing the ''Communist Manifesto'':, creating [[communism]], one of the most notable ideologies of the 20th century and also one of the most [[skub|controversial]].

Ideologies aside you can boil down the Industrial Revolution social movements to the average human thinking: "Hey, we can actually make tons and tons of wondrous gadgets to make life better, but why is that I can't get some of the gadgets too so I can have a better life?". While this meme emerged first in West Europe and North America it inevitably expanded to the colonies and independent nations until it eventually covered the entire planet.

The Industrial Revolution is the start of the Modern World and many of its issues still persist to this day. People can relate to an Industrial Revolution era person more easily than that of a peasant in the Middle Ages, a serf in the Dark Ages, a citizen soldier of the Classical Era, a scribe at a pharaoh's court, a priest king in the Fertile Crescent or Grug and his rocks. The downside of this is that these issues are still politically charged to this day.

===Fantasy Relevance===
As a tangent from the historical to the literary, the Industrial Revolution is something which often looms in the background of Fantasy at a meta level with various degrees of overtness. The implication is that sooner or latter as the elves in splendid cities and ancient forests weave their spells and loose their arrows, the dwarves delve and hold the line to defend their mountain homes, the orcs sound the drums of war and sharpen their blades for battle, dragons soar, necromancers scheme, kings reign, adventurers set out on epic quests and all that fantastic wonder, somewhere someone notices a pot on the boil rattling its lid and imagines how the force of pressurized steam could be used, setting in motion the end of that era. Yes, that's a gross oversimplification of a centuries long processes with many intermediate steps that culminated with Locomotives and the Crystal Palace. The point still stands that in a world where people like us exist, eventually observant souls, those inclined to tinker, those looking to make work easier and increase productivity and those who can see the work of such inventive souls as the keys to wealth and power will figure these things out and move a society beyond the 15th century with those which refuse to move with the times getting rolled over.

In Tolkien's work this fact is dealt with mostly in subtext of disdain (the industrialists of Middle Earth were villains and the results of their labors were ruin and destruction) and a sense of melancholy as past ages end. In other fantasy settings such as [[Forgotten Realms]] there are forces working to stop this, ranging from organizations like the harpers to the Gods enforcing [[Medieval Stasis]]. Some settings, like [[Discworld]] and to a smaller degree [[Warhammer Fantasy]], accept that this will happen and have the transition woven into their worldbuilding. In fact you can see Pratchett's later works as an answer to Tolkien's criticism towards modernity, while oversimplified in some aspects the Moist von Lipwig Trilogy makes some good explanations towards how industrialization emerged and how it works as well as its potential flaws and shortcomings without going full ludite.

==Industrial Revolution inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* [[Steampunk]]
* Much of Discworld
* Thief series which are set in a weird blend of medieval fantasy and early industrial revolution.
* [[Eberron]] before the Last War. After it Eberron is a cross between Industrial Revolution and interwar.
* [[Arcanum]] is a magical world that is currently undergoing a revolution.
* [[Iron Kingdoms]]'s whole schtick is that it's a typical fantasy setting that developed into this.
* The [[Skaven]], particularly their Weapons Teams and anything related to [[Clan Skryre]]. Thankfully one of the reasons why they never achieved world domination in one fell swoop is the overall lack of quality control on their gadgets.

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

A Song of Ice and Fire

2023-03-02T03:59:01Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Locations */

[[image:Game_of_Thrones_Title-DVD.png|300px|thumb|WIENER PARTY! WIENER PARTY!]]

{{Spoilers}}
{{Grimdark}}
{{Sick|Among other things, the books can barely go ten pages without having another rape.}}
'''Warning: This article contains so many spoilers we're ruining books that haven't even been released yet.'''

{{Topquote|If you think this story has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.|Ramsay Bolton, nailing the grimdark theme of this series}}

{{Topquote|It matters not from whence the blood flows. Only that it flows.|George RR Martin, Exalted Champion of Khorne when explaining why so many characters get offed}}

'''''A Song of Ice and Fire''''', better known as '''''Game of Thrones''''' (though only the first book has that title) is a [[Grimdark]] fantasy book series for people who hate fantasy, or at the very least, have gotten their fill of Tolkien pretenders and want something more "distinct". Its central themes include [[Tzeentch|political Machiavellian scheming]], [[Khorne|ultraviolence]], [[Slaanesh|incest/sex with exposition/tons of rape]], and [[Nurgle|everyone trying to survive in such a Crapsack World of perpetual suffering]]. There is also lots and lots of food. Thus it has become one of the most popular series of our generation and its author, [[George R. R. Martin]], has been praised for his highly realized world and gritty low fantasy style. He was even called "the American [[Tolkien]]" by <s>Time magazine</s> gormless idiots who lump diametrically different writers together for no other reason than that they're both fantasy authors. The two authors do both have a passion (and talent) for worldbuilding and writing doorstoppers, but that's also where the similarities generally end. Still, the comparisons to Tolkien would probably explain this series' sudden spike in popularity following the TV show (at least [[Skub|to a point, anyway.]]) The great joke of an actual World War veteran writing fantasy about heroic knights and elves being compared to and contrasted with a conscientious objector who writes edgy fantasy is not lost on most (though its worth mentioning that Martin is as much of a Tolkien buff as any of us, meaning that he didn't write the series as a "fuck you" to Tolkien's work as some might assume).

The series itself is set on the [[Original character, do not steal|totally not medieval European ripoff]] realm of Westeros as it is wracked by a massive succession war drawing its realms into conflict. Everyone's picking up the pieces from the previous war until one family's bid for power starts another war (book one), A bunch of dudes declare themselves kings (book two), they're burning the continent down in their scramble for power, and somehow all the fuck-ups managed to lose anyway (book three). Just when the guys who lost the least start thinking they get to rule over the remaining chaos, more fuck ups happen and more dudes show up (book four). Sadly, winter has finally come and, unbeknownst to most people, [[Thousand Sons|evil ice wizards leading soulless undead]] [[Alpha Legion|assumed to be only myths by most people]] are about to invade the continent from the north. By the fifth book, things are going and/or will go to shit even for the bad guys.

According to a leaked fan conversation, George R. R. Martin jokingly stated the series would end with an epic cock-slap fight between Samwell Tarly and Jaime Lannister.

TL;DR: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Roses War of Roses] with a helpin' of <s>cliched fantasy</s> George's old sci-fi writing plots given a fantasy overhaul and [[/d/]]-lite.

[[ASOIAF Miniature Game|Miniature game has their own page now]]

== Setting and History ==
Most of the series takes place on an America-sized continent named Westeros, which stretches from pretty much the North Pole to the deserts of Dorn. It is populated by three main nations: First Men (Northmen and wildlings aka not!Celts), Andals (pretty much everyone else aka not!Anglo-Saxons) and Rhoynar (Dornishmen). All of them came from Essos in waves: the First Men displacing the druids and giants, then came the Andals who pushed the First Men further north and assimilated the survivors, and finally by the Rhoynar, a matriarch-ish society that fled the destruction of their homeland and finally found a home in Dorne. Ironborn (not!Vikings from western islands) are also of note, since despite their First Men ancestry, they developed an entirely different religion and culture based off raiding due to the barren sea-rocks they inhabit ([[Deep Ones|and possibly also influenced by weird creepy things living in the water that lived on the islands before they did]])

For thousand years Westeros was an utter mess of seven-ish kingdoms vying for supremacy. But while they were busy banging rocks together, the Eastern continent, Essos, was united by the <s>elves</s> magical dragon-riders powered by incest. The Valyrians would expand all over Essos, but their only presence in Westeros was a small island outpost (later named Dragonstone). At one point, however, the daughter of a minor noble family, Daenys Targaryen, had prophetic dreams about the death of her country, which forced her father to flee alongside his family and most valuable possessions (five dragons and some magic shit). His rivals in power laughed at him, but he turned to be right as a gigantic volcanic eruption obliterated Valyria and started the age of anarchy in Essos

The Targaryens did fuck all for a little over a century, until the ambitious lord Aegon grew tired of sister-fucking and decided to forge his own kingdom in Westeros. Even though his army was tiny and he was facing off against the full might of an entire continent, he also had '''dragons''', which in ASOIAF can grow to comically large proportions, and allowed him to wipe the floor with anyone dumb enough to stand against him. Just to make a point, he burnt down *the* largest fortress in Westeros ''in a single night'', melting down stone walls with dragonfire and leaving it cursed for centuries. Though, because the Targs were so reliant on dragons, the only Kingdom they couldn't conquer was [[Dune|Dorne]], who [[Tallarn|mujahideen]]'d their way to a truce after killing one of the sister-wives' dragons with a Ballista and (probably) threatening Aegon with the knowledge that they were willing to spend their entire Kingdom's wealth to hire [[Callidus Assassin|magical assassins]] to end the Targaryen line.

The Targaryens ruled for 280 years, but their rule was also marked by lots of shitty kings (because of the rampant incest), but also by rebelling bastards (who were the result of non-incest). Somewhere along the way, magic began to leave the world. Spells were no longer as effective and the price for such magic became steeper and steeper (which is why most magic in the "present" requires blood or sacrifice of some sort). This was most evident in Westeros when the dynasty's dragons became successively smaller and smaller; it also probably didn't help that they raised them in a coliseum-style Vault and also only had 5 dragons to start with. The dynasty's fate was sealed in the "Dance of Dragons" which was an internal conflict between Targaryens and the last real war to include dragons and dragonriders.

Their ultimate downfall came just before the beginning of the series, when Prince Rhaegar (supposedly) kidnapped the bride of a powerful lord Robert Baratheon and the Mad King killed her father and brother, who just wanted her back, triggering a rebellion that they lost and once again setting the stage for a Seven Kingdom free-for-all.

==Characters==
{{cleanup}}
Since these books have some thousand named characters, you won't remember most of them without an obsessive disorder over details.
Here's a relatively shortlist (mostly based on the TV series rather than the books, but seems to randomly switch between the two) for the characters you'll care about. We'll also be making an effort to mostly focus on characters from the main series, rather than historical figures like Maegor Targaryen, the Dance of Dragons Blacks and Greens, and so on. Trust us, given the number of characters we already have to cover, it's for the best. The houses listed here doesn't even come close to covering them all, either.

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:100%">
===House Stark===

''"Winter Is Coming"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Honourable, bro-tier northerners who always [[Space Wolves|compare themselves to direwolves and have a few as pets]]. They have a tendency towards being so resolutely honorable that proves to bite them in the ass due to naivete about how [[Tzeentch|Westerosi corrupt politics actually works]] (not that dishonorable characters often fare any better, but that's an "Anyone Can Die" setting for you). They're also arguably the protagonists of the setting. Basically Scotland and/or House Lancaster in the War of the Roses (but named after House York).
* Eddard Stark, ''The Quiet Wolf'': Patriarch, lord and POV death-puppet. Not nearly as stupid as everyone tries to pretend...but still kind of stupid, and very much a dead man walking. Honorable to a fault and deeply repulsed by the politicking that goes on around him, which eventually leads to a mild case of death by decapitation. Has somewhat of a mixed reputation among the big players of Westeros; Jamie Lannister despises Ned for judging him for breaking his oath and saving millions of people in King's Landing and never listening to his side of the story, Littlefinger hates him for much, much pettier reasons (as outlined further below). Varys and Tyrion both kind of admire him, but were in agreement over the fact that Ned did the worst possible thing at the most inconvenient time and ultimately got what was coming to him.
* Benjen Stark: Ned's ranger/Night's Watch brother (so the Faramir to his Boromir), who disappears later in the story and may or may not be the mysterious "Coldhands" (in the TV show he is).
* Robb Stark, ''The Young Wolf'': Shiny, King Arthur-like hero who veers between being [[Lawful Stupid]] and [[Lion El'Johnson|a brilliant military leader]]. After waging a successful war to avenge his murdered father, he was betrothed to a noblewoman but he ended having comfort sex with a virgin noblewoman which may have been arranged by her scheming bitch mother, while in softcore porno he got the hots for a commoner. Cacks it nastily: he got his head cut off and his pet's wolf's head stuck on his body, which was paraded around while his enemies chanted "HERE COMES THE KING IN THE NORTH!" In other words, he's a Scottish [[Roman Empire|Hannibal Barca]]. In the show his pregnant wife dies with him for added Grimdark, but in the books he (wisely) leaves her behind when he goes to the Red Wedding.
* Sansa Stark: Useless teenage girl extraordinaire at the start of the series with dreams of marrying a prince and "having lots of babies", but gets shat on hard by reality, being a case-study in what happens when you go into a Grimdark world thinking like a Fairy Tale Princess. Becomes Littlefinger's replacement goldfish when Catelyn's no longer around, her father got killed and her best friend was sold as a sex slave, and ended up in the worst relationship we can possibly imagine with King Joffrey. [[Grimdark|Even got deflowered via rape by Ramsey Bolton]] and married to him before managing to escape with the help of others. Currently acting as a co-ruler to her brother/cousin Jon Snow, and has learned much from her suffering, allowing her to kick Littlefinger out of the Great Game via throat slitting. While in the book Littlefinger is/was setting her up at House Arryn to claim the Vale and the North, the show version becomes QUEEN IN DA NORF in the final episode.
* Arya Stark: Little tomboy assassin. Has a kill list, but doesn't get to use it so long as she is an amnesiac apprentice of [[Officio Assassinorum|the Friendly Neighborhood Assassins Guild]]. In the books, she's still training with the Faceless Men, but in the show she's broken away from them and headed back to Westeros to get revenge on a LOT of people, giving her one of the highest kill counts in the series. She goes home to Winterfell when she hears that Jon and Sansa took it back and starts acting as a general "troubleshooter" for Sansa while scaring the hell out of everyone with all her new assassin skillz. Kills the Night King like a fucking champion in Season 8 (though in a way that doesn't actually make any sense), then rides south to add Cersei to her body count. Instead, the Hound talks her out of it and she [[The Lord of the Rings|decides to sail into the unknown west]]. Kind of the [[Mary Sue|writer's pet]] in the show, among other things getting to avenge the Red Wedding in a brutally cinematic manner even though Dumb and Dumber justified giving us a pregnant woman getting stabbed to death on-screen because Game of Thrones is above "cliches" like loved ones getting avenged in just such a way. And her aforementioned killing of the Night King that doesn't actually make any sense, since it required her getting the drop on him in a way that was ''physically impossible without out-of-universe special effects equipment''. Book version is still level-grinding to get to her TV version's skill level.
* Catelyn Stark (nee Tully): A woman who trusts the wrong people at the worst time, causing a lot of misery. Gets killed along with Robb, then comes back (books only) as Lady Stoneheart, an undead witch bent on killing all the Boltons, Freys, Greyjoys, Lannisters... pretty much everyone she thinks was tangentially involved in betraying her and her family, or somebody who just pissed her off (kind of hard to blame her though). The show writers left this part out completely, which caused much [[rage]] and [[skub]] in the fandom.
* Bran Stark: Intelligent little boy, named after the founder of House Stark, Brandon the Builder (basically Tony Stark combined with [[Leman Russ]]). He was crippled in the first sign of major [[GrimDark]]. Has prophetic dreams and becomes a [[druid]]. In the TV series, fucks things up by alerting the Others to where he's hiding, which gets all of the Children, his loyal wolf, the Three-Eyed Crow and Hodor killed. For good measure, turns out to have accidentally ''caused'' Hodor to become, well, Hodor, as he was using his druid powers to figure out why Hodor is only able to say Hodor, resulting in Hodor's gruesome death-by-zombies being beamed directly into young Hodor's brain. He's now the Three-Eyed Raven and likes going around being creepy as fuck and generally weirding people out. Becomes King of the <s>Seven</s> Six Kingdoms in a hilariously nonsensical plot twist in the finale.
* Rickon Stark: Four years old at the start, turning into a real little [[Barbarian]] from not being raised properly, because everyone who would have raised him was dead or missing. In the books, he and his wildling nanny Osha are on the cannibal-infested island of Skagos, and Davos Seaworth is on his way there to pick them up so that the northern lords who are still loyal to House Stark have a figurehead to rally behind. In the show, he ends up hanging out at the Umbers, then is handed over to Ramsay as a prisoner when Smalljon becomes afraid of the Wildlings living north of him (who were invited by Jon Snow to fight the Zombie Apocalypse), and finally dies via arrow in a sick game of "dodge the missiles" courtesy of Ramsey.
* Jon Snow, ''The White Wolf'': A bastard living in the Stark household before leaving for the Night's Watch (basically [[The Last Chancers|Colonel Schaeffer]] with more convicted rapists under his command) and excels there because nearly every one of his fellow recruits are peasants who have never had a formal days of training while Jon has had the serious training afforded to all lords. After he takes over by becoming the Watch Commander secures and alliance with the Wildlings, ancient barbarian enemies of the Night's Watch, because when the end of the world is coming you tend to think outside the box. Also gets a Wildling girlfriend, but she dies. He was taken under the wing by the Lord Commander Jeor Mormont and given advice by Maester Aemon (a Targaryen who is so '''old''' that everyone in the south has forgotten he existed, and unbeknownst to him, his great-great-granduncle), and managed to actually be a competent leader. Sfter a disastrous loss of strength after the failure of the Great Ranging, and then the Wildling invasion, he unilaterally decides to let the Wildlings through in exchange for their aid in securing the Wall against the real enemy; he even impresses Stannis (The Mannis) with his honor and sense of justice. [[Grimdark|And then, all the corrupt exiles from the South (and the rejects who were left behind during the Ranging) banded together to kill him]].
**Though he's currently dead in the books as a result of the mutiny, he was revived by R'hllor in the series after being stabbed to death by the senior members of the Watch. Isn't actually Eddard's bastard son, but rather the legitimate son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, meaning that he is, in fact, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. The new KING IN DA NORF according to his supporters after he killed Ramsay Bolton and took back Winterfell, and is also currently hooking up with his own aunt.
**He turns on Daenerys once he realizes she's lost it and kills her in the throne room, but [[Plot Armor|for some reason her dragon doesn't kill him despite seeing him do the the deed]]. The Unsullied want his head, but instead, King Bran exiles him to the Night's Watch and he fucks off into the far north to live with the Free Folk.
* Hodor: Hodor. Hodor, Hodor, Hodor. <s>An enormous and possibly retarded stable boy, and Bran's faithful steed.</s> Hodor. Ok, in all actual seriousness, this guy is probably one of the most tragic figures in this series (and that's saying something). [[Grimdark|The guy basically received horrible visions of his own death fighting a horde of zombies, buying time for his friends to escape by literally holding the door shut as he was hacked apart]]. This causes him to suffer a mental break, leading him to develop Immature Personality Disorder and making it so the only thing he can say is a garbled version of his friend's last request "hold the door" for all of his adult life; the logic here is that "hold the door" devolves into "hol' th' door" and eventually "Hodor". You now feel bad for at laughing at the guy.
* Osha: A Wildling woman who surrendered to the Starks and becomes their servant in exchange for not getting killed. Now dead in the show thanks to Ramsay's dickery, costing the cast another valued waifu.</div></div>

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===House Targaryen===

''"Fire and Blood"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The former Dragon kings and rulers of Westeros, [[Eldar|fair-haired purple-eyed beautiful people]] who have descended from the [[Dark Age of Technology|ancient technologically-advanced superpower]] of [[Roman Empire|Valyria]], which collapsed because of [[Fall of the Eldar|their colossal hubris]]. After the anarchic [[Age of Strife|Century of Blood]], the Targaryen patriarch Aegon I, instead of reconquering the lost cause of Essos and of Valyria's former empire, looked towards the rather primitive continent of Westeros, and its squabbling Seven Kingdoms, [[Great Crusade|to establish his own Imperial dynasty and unify the Realm]]. Aegon I is essentially the Low Fantasy version of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Conqueror William the Conqueror] and/or the [[God-Emperor of Mankind]], with a little dash of [[/d/|incest]].

[[Rules Lawyer|Thanks to a loophole]], the Targaryens were immune to the moral objections relating to incest. Common sense (and common decency) took back seat to a time-honoured policy of [[/d/|catastrophic inbreeding]], which made a number of problems, the most obvious of which was that a whole bunch of them were fucking crazy. Aegon I married his older and younger sisters and had several kids with each, which would be the start of another Targaryen tradition: the occasional succession crisis. Because GRRM can't write a book without going off on a tangent (and because the Targaryens were running things for a good chunk of the setting's history), the Targaryens and their 300ish long legacy is full of rebellions and wars ripped from English History and in turn mined by HBO. Fun interregnums include the Dance of Dragons, where the Targaryens used the last of their dragons in a brutal civil-war against each other (and now a TV show), and the Blackfyre Rebellions, where the fat-fuck Aegon IV (who had Henry VII's opposite problems: he fucked everyone and had many heirs) legitimized all his bastards and even gifted one of them the dynasty's greatest treasure: the Blackfyre sword. Actually, considering how ''much'' of these rebellions were caused by half-Targaryen bastards, [[/d/|maybe they had a point?]]

Eventually, the lineage was banished to Essos after a brutal civil war: Aerys II, a crazy paranoid king that savagely executed many different people, made the wrong move of executing the Lord and Heir of the North; the two men were in King's Landing because Aery's son, Rhaegar, the '''non''-crazy one, eloped/abducted Robert Baratheon's fiance and their sister. Since he was already married and she was engaged, they left together in secret, which caused Robert the Cuck to go wild. Joining with Eddard, the new Lord of the North, and their teacher/foster-dad Jon Arryn, the three Kingdoms rebelled and Robert warhammered Rhaegar because STR > DEX.

The survivors were smuggled out/hidden from Robert, with Viserys and his then-pregnant mother hiding on their ancestral home of Dragonstone first, before fucking off to Essos when the war was truly lost; Rhaegar's ''first'' son and daughter were killed and his wife raped by the Lannister's bannermen, though Rhaegar's best friend [[Gay|who loved him very, very, very much]] claims to have helped sneak him out of Westeros and hides with him in Essos; finally, Rhaegar and Lyanna's son, Jon/Aegon, was adopted by Ned, who was made to realize that the entire civil war was a misunderstanding and that his whoremongering drunk of a foster brother would've probably been a terrible brother-in-law anyway. [[Grimdark]]. Basically, the entire British royal family, but with more incest, and a lot of dragons. Still, they occasionally did have genuinely good people like Aegon V (aka Egg), Jaeherys I the Conciliator, his wife Good Queen Alysanne and complete badasses like Brynden Bloodraven and Baelor Breakspear (too bad Bloodraven is hooked up to Old God wi-fi permanently and Breakspear died before he could become king).
Pseudo-Romans and/or the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Normandy House of Normandy].

* Aerys II, ''The Mad King'': [[Kharn|A pretty fun guy to be around]]. Had a psychotic fascination for fire, which extended to being a psychotic fascination for burning traitors, a category of people that eventually grew to include anybody he disliked for any reason, anyone who disagreed with him, and a few people who were unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire. [[Goge Vandire|Teamkilled by his bodyguard Jaime for planning to burn the city down with everyone inside it, and even refused to accept his death until he actually died]].
* Daenerys Targaryen, ''Stormborn'': She was sold by her brother to a barbarian leader [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|Khal (warlord) Drogo]] in exchange for the promise that he'd use his Khalassar (Warband/tribe) to conquer Westeros. She found her self esteem as his wife, then her husband killed her idiot brother Viserys and promised to conquer the world for Daenerys, making her a full-fledged badass barbarian war queen. Unfortunately, her husband died when [[Derp|Daenerys trusted one of the slaves whose town Drogo had pillaged and burnt to heal an infected wound of his]] and his horde fell apart (though the book is somewhat ambiguous as to whether the slave did kill Drogo). Then she hatched three dragons (completely by accident when she tried to commit suicide) bringing them back from extinction, and now everyone wants to marry her because she is now one of the most powerful people around due to said dragons and being good-looking (in the books this is by the age-of-consent in Westeros standards, where girls are women when they start getting their periods and boys are men at age 13). [[Gets shit done]] except the entire fifth book, in which she mopes around about wanting to marry an annoying, flamboyant mercenary instead of saving herself for political marriage. After banging the flamboyant mercenary, she later marries a Meereenese noble who guarantees he can get her some peace (more likely [[Just As Planned|just as he planned]]).
**She also does nothing while insurgents kill her men, a horde of plagued refugees spread disease to her city and standing idly by while an enemy army besieges her walls, all for realistically political reasons because the world is a horrible place. Learns how to train her dragon. In the books she's just encountered another Khalassar after being hauled away from Meereen by Drogo. In the TV series, she takes over all the Dothraki and adds them to her army, then heads for Westeros to invade the place with her army of elite hoplites, massive horde of Dothraki and her dragons. By the time she gets to King's Landing she's taken significant losses, including two of her dragons, and is fucking her nephew (Jon Snow). Officially went Mad Queen as of S8E5, wherein she burned most of King's Landing after the city attempted to surrender and has decided to "liberate" everyone on the planet, whether they want it or not. Jon kills her in the series finale so that she won't go around burninating the rest of the world.
* The dragons: The three dragons that Daenerys hatched. They're wyverns that breathe fire, [[Awesome|have blood hot enough to melt steel]], and [[List of /tg/ Cuisine|cook their meat before eating it]]. Naturally, some of the coolest things in the story.
** Drogon; named for her late husband, Khal Drogo. Black and red, the biggest and [[Gork|most aggressive dragon]]. Starts eating people and then escapes, leading to the other two getting imprisoned. Interrupts a gladiator tournament, killing a lot of people before being whipped by Daenerys into flying her to a Khalassar that broke off from her husband's after his death. In the show, he's the last dragon standing after Viserion bites it north of the Wall and his undead body is put down at Winterfell and Rhaegal gets shot down over Dragonstone. Takes Dany's body, destroys the Iron Throne and fucks off to who knows where after Dany is killed.
** Rhaegal; named for the first of her dead brothers, Rhaegar. Green and gold, the [[Mork|cunning one]] and the loudest (with a roar "...that would have sent a hundred lions fleeing,"). Kills Quentyn Martell when the latter is trying to goad Viserion (see below). After breaking out of jail with Viserion they go "all your base are belong to us" on Meereen, killing people and taking over the pyramid of a loyal family as his lair. Last seen playing "sack the town" with Viserion in the books. Dead in the show thanks to Euron Greyjoy and some Diabolus ex Machina bullshit.
** Viserion; named for her other brother Viserys. White and gold and the [[Vulkan|friendliest]] (as dragons go, he still eats people). Dug cave for himself in his jail then moved into another pyramid after his and his brother's great escape. Gets killed by the [[Vampire Counts|Night's King in the show via a magic spear, then his corpse is reanimated to be the Night King's zombie dragon steed]] and blasts a hole in the famous Wall, allowing the armies of snow elves and zombies to start flooding Westeros. Now perma-dead thanks to the Night King biting it.
* Viserys Targaryen, ''The Beggar King'': Daenerys' physically abusive older brother. Best known for being a bully with incestuous lust for her, and an arrogant and incompetent fuck with a massive sense of entitlement. He eventually got himself killed for being an all-around jerk and whiny idiot, which culminated in him threatening his sister and unborn nephew with a sword while drunk in a sacred Dothraki place where weapons and bloodshed are forbidden on pain of death (execution is done by bloodless death - having a scarf wrapped tight around the neck and being drowned in a barrel). Daenerys' husband [[awesome|poured molten gold over his head and called it his promised crown, also ensuring his death didn't technically shed any blood in their sacred place]].
* Aegon Targaryen, ''Aegon VI'': Daenerys' nephew, the son of her brother Rhaegar. Been hiding in Essos for the entire length of the series, but recently raised an army of Westerosi exiles and threw them all a massive Welcome Home party with rape and pillage. Wants to marry his aunt because she has dragons, ''and might not actually be a member of House Targaryen'' if you believe some fans. He can actually count past 6, can multiply numbers, can read different language and has a minor understanding of geometry thus cementing him as one of the most educated people in this overwrought series. Can also do his own laundry.
**Like Dany, he has his own band of misfits following him around. While Dany has Dothraki and Unsullied, Aegon has '''The Golden Company''', a mercenary company of ten thousand, descended from the forces loyal to the Blackfyre bastards. The Golden Company has a long and storied history of invading Westeros and failing, which has led to the theories that Aegon is really a Blackfyre. Because of their long history and descent from actual nobles, the Golden Company is nothing like the mercenary rabble common in the rest of the series, even having dedicated knight, archer, and War Elephant divisions.
* Brynden Rivers ''Bloodraven'': A Targaryen bastard who came to prominence about a hundred years before the series as a sort of sorcerer, he later became known as the "Three-Eyed Raven/Crow" after encountering the Children of the Forest, and uses his powers to help advert the Long Night and train Bran. He's described as having long, white hair, missing an eye, bound to a tree, knows all and sees all, associated heavily with ravens and omens... [[Vikings|yeah, he's very much Odin, come to think of it. Just a lot more of an asshole than the Warrior King of legend.]]
**In his prime, he was pretty much just Loki. The Spymaster ''and'' Hand of the King during the Blackfyre Rebellions (a rebellion of all Aegon IV's many bastards, [[Troll|who he legitimized on his deathbed because that's how he rolled]]), he was one of the few to remain loyal. He was a sorceror and had a spy network so thorough, it was a commmon-joke that the [[Magnus the Red|one-eyed]] sorcerer had "[[Thousand Sons|a thousand eyes]], and [[Tzeentch|one]]" He had his own elite unit of archers that solved the first rebellion by sticking the claimant, his heir, and finally his twin, full of arrows.
**Exiled to the Night's Watch after assassinating after assassinating a Blackfyre after promising him safe passage, a running theme in ASOIAF.
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===House Lannister===

''"Hear Me Roar"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">[[Monopoly|Westeros' richest family]], proud, pompous, selfish and fabulous assholes. Not much of a martial tradition but if you cross them [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7t7cnwlOgY they will fucking cut you]. You can tell they are the bad guys because they have an army of sick fucks, including a zebra-riding mercenary band and 7' 8" Khornate Champion <s>not-Goliath</s> Gregor Clegane. House York (though named after House Lancaster) combined with the House of Rothschild and the Mafia. Their unofficial motto is "A Lannister Always Pays His Debts"
* Tywin Lannister, ''The Lion of Lannister'': The Godfather, head of the house, and obsessed with his reputation as a Magnificent Bastard extraordinaire. Lawful Evil Personified. He was a most feared general whose greatest achievement was [[Exterminatus|erasing House Reyne from existence]], which was immortalised in his own sweet-yet-creepy-as-fuck theme song (The Rains of Castamere) that became used as a warning against anyone standing against him. During his tenure as Hand of the King (i.e. Prime Minister), he was a political genius who operated as the true power behind the Iron Throne, keeping the realm stable and prosperous despite the stupidity of Aerys II and Joffrey. However, despite all of his achievements, he's an [[Emperor|absolutely terrible father]], who treats his children as nothing more than tools to further his political agenda. He completely overlooks the incestuous relationship his two oldest children had, and hated Tyrion and made his life a living hell for very poor reasons. He humiliated Tyrion whenever it wouldn't threaten the family's reputation, berated Tyrion for being a whore-monger despite secretly being one himself (this is ''only'' in the show), [[Grimdark|tried to get him killed multiple times]], and as the capstone of awful parenting, he taught Tyrion not to marry commoners after he married one called Tysha - by forcing Tyrion to watch Tysha get gang-raped, forcing him to rape her too and then annulling their marriage. The only person Tywin truly loved was his wife. He eventually gets his comeuppance when Tyrion finds out the truth about the Tysha incident and kills him with a crossbow, all while mentioning that out of all his children, Tyrion was the most alike to Tywin himself. He's based on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Neville,_16th_Earl_of_Warwick Warwick the Kingmaker].
* Joanna Lannister: Tywin's late wife and first cousin, meaning the next three characters are inbred as well, ironically. Dies giving birth to Tyrion, which is part of why Tywin hates him, though Cersei hates him for other reasons. Caught wind of Cersei and Jaime's incestuous tendencies, but she died before she could tell Tywin. It is implied that her ghost visits Jaime in a dream and mourns the current state of her family.
* Cersei Lannister, ''Bitch Queen'': Tywin and Joanna's first child. Twin sister to Jaime Lannister and wife to King Robert Baratheon. She fucks her brother Jaime all the time and had three of his children, whom she passed off as Robert's to grab power. She is a massive narcissist who thinks of herself as "female Tywin" and hence seeks to rule Westeros as the Queen, and will do anything to keep her power... even when [[Abbadon the Despoiler|most of her plans end up becoming utter failures]]. Crazy as all fuck and prophesied to be killed by the "little brother." This is because of a prophecy made by a witch, Cersei was a child that she'd be a beautiful queen, lose everything, her children would die before her, and the "Valonqar" would kill her. Though that does explain why she hates Tyrion as hard as all fuck, [[Just As Planned|the exact translation of the term]] that was used is "younger sibling", and not necessarily her sibling, which opens the door to all sorts of characters who hate the fuck out of her. Since Jaime is technically younger by a few seconds, him killing Cersei would be an interesting twist not without buildup. Possibly the Witch was messing with her head because of what a bitch Cersei was being to her, something Cersei never grew out of. Cersei is currently alive only because Varys wants her to be, [[Just As Planned|as she's a terrible queen who'll destabilize the realm enough for him to bring back the Targaryens]]. She was completely shaved, stripped of power in all but her royal heritage and forced to do a nude walk of penance throughout the city by the High Sparrow (ASOIAF Pope- equivalent/[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther Martin Luther] except he won the Reformation) after he uncovered her crimes. Now she's waiting for her hair to grow back and maybe thinking of revenge.
**She gets it in the show by blowing up the Great Sept of Baelor (ASOIAF [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Cathedral Canterbury Cathedral]) with everyone she doesn't like inside it, having her cousin killed near the Wildfire, killing Tyene Sand with the same poison that Tyene used on Myrcella and forcing Ellaria to watch, then capturing the nun who was her jailer and [[Grimdark|leaving her to be tortured to death by zombie Gregor Clegane]]. She is in short [[Thanquol]] disguised as a beautiful blonde woman. Gets anticlimactically squashed by a collapsing ceiling along with Jaime during Daenerys's assault on King's Landing. (her biggest issue? Not dying sooner, for the Seven's sake!)
* Jaime Lannister, ''The Kingslayer'': Younger twin brother (by about three seconds) to Cersei Lannister and commander of the Kingsguard. He loves his sister in every sense of the word and had three children with her. Killed the last king despite his oath, and is widely hated for it, even though everyone agrees that dying was a massive improvement for Aerys. The reason for this betrayal was that Aerys had a huge stockpile of Acme Brand Magic Napalm stockpiled under the city, ready to be set off the moment a siege broke through the town walls, and Jaime's options were to let it happen or kill Aerys before the crazy fuck got ''everybody'' killed. His desire to openly love his sister and win the respect he feels he deserves eventually causes Cersei to reject him. Starts off as an arrogant douche who [[Grimdark|tried to murder Bran Stark, but accidentally crippled him instead]]; as the series progressed he became progressively more bro-tier besides the whole wants-to-fuck-his-sister thing, though he eventually begins to question even this devotion after seeing what a bitch she is when she comes to power. He genuinely loves Tyrion, so much so that he actually went off on his own to get him back after he heard Catelyn had him imprisoned in the Vale. He gets freed by Robb and goes on a journey through Westeros, loses his arm, and gets a lesson in valour and knighthood from Brienne of Tarth. He starts to question his legacy after his son Joffrey makes him Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, a position that was only made available because Joff expelled the Knight who had actually earned it. Since Joff and Cersei had filled the Kingsguard with sycophants and their own thugs, Jaime's role as the Lord Commander has left a bad taste in his mouth because he is now the leader of probably the least prestigious iteration of the Kingsguard ever. Basically, [[Sigvald|Sigvald the Magnificent]] currently in the midst of a redemption arc. In the books, he is currently being lured into a trap by Lady Stoneheart.
**In the show, he has finally told Cersei to get fucked after realizing that she has well and truly lost it, and rode north to help fight the White Walkers. He survived the Battle of Winterfell, hooked up with Brienne, and then rides south [[Derp|because he just can't let Cersei go.]] Winds up getting shanked by Euron Greyjoy and dies [[Fail|via collapsing ceiling]].
* Tyrion Lannister, ''Halfman'': a very intelligent dwarf who is awesome, but hated by everyone, either because of his deformity, or because he's a Lannister. The few people who treat him well is an uncle that went missing, his brother Jaime, Jon Snow who learned a lot from him, and Varys, who at first saw him as an asset, but grew to admire his political abilities and intellect, even declaring him a friend. He seems to do much better when getting drunk with whores, rogues, bastards and barbarians. His silver tongue is one of his greatest strengths (he's witty and good at persuading people) and weaknesses (he tends to think himself to be way more clever than he actually is, which mainifests in him being quick with insults and the truth in a city ruled by sociopaths and liars). Tyrion is also one of the only characters with an actual sense of the bigger picture, and an interest toward steering the world toward an outcome that ''doesn't'' involve a [[The End Times|Warhammer End Times]] scenario. **Unfortunately, the world's movers, shakers, and those who generally have the power to make a difference are increasingly either a) dead, b) scattered to the winds or c) hate his dwarf guts. Despite the increasing difficulty and fruitlessness of his task, however, [[Awesome|Tyrion still fights]]. After being framed for killing Joffrey, he killed his own father and fled Westeros. In the books, he is currently in exile in the Free Cities, weaselling his way into leading a merc band and trying to sign them up with Daenerys' forces, recognizing her as one of the few chances Westeros has got of fixing its shit (provided she can get her own shit together, which she's having a bit of trouble with).
**Since characters in this series tend to either be walking tropes, rip-offs of other fantasy characters, or historical people with different names, Tyrion is probably based on the great [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Vorkosigan Miles Vorkosigan] (who was himself based on a few people including Sir Winston Churchill) and is a nod to King Richard III (a deformed but competent king later demonized by historiographers of his era). Even if he is usually the smartest one in the room at any given time, though, Tyrion is still not above having some derp moments. Exhibit A, when Tyrion asked his father what happened to his first wife (right before killing him), he took an ''obvious'' "I don't know and I don't care" response ("Wherever whores go") as if it was literal directions, and afterward keeps asking random people if they know where whores go, with predictable reactions. (Admittedly he'd just killed his ex and was probably in the middle of some serious PTSD at the time, which is not great for your brain.) The show version eventually meets Daenerys and becomes her Hand only to [[Fail|fuck up a bunch of stuff]] and lose her trust. He sells her out when he realizes that she's gone round the bend and winds up becoming Hand to King Bran.
**Don't confuse TV Tyrion with book Tyrion. Book Tyrion is every bit as amoral and vindictive as many view him as and waaaaay more of a grey character, especially after his exile from Westeros, where he pulls off some truly despicable shit out of spite and his own self-loathing (for example, forming a genuine romantic connection with a fellow dwarf woman, then abuse the shit out of her). TV Tyrion pretty much becomes the audiences avatar from season 6 onwards. His entire character is robbed of any agency in order to make D&D look smart and give big moral lessons to Daenerys (which make no sense within the context of the show).
* Kevan Lannister: Tywin's younger brother, considered "the reliable one". One of the few decent Lannisters, though saying that he is perfectly happy carrying out Tywin's bidding. Tried to talk sense into Cersei and was later called in to try and fix her mess. He did such a good job of it that Varys decided to personally thank him. With a crossbow. And a group of knife-wielding children. In the show he dies with the rest of the crowd when the Great Sept got nuked by Cersei - the manner of his book death was given over to Grand Maester Pycelle at the exact same time.
* Lancel Lannister: Kevan's son, Tywin's nephew and Tyrion, Jamie and Cersei's cousin. A callow, spoilt but well-meaning nobleman. Pretty much Joffery but mentally stable, not sadistic and capable of compassion and honor. Enters a sexual relationship with his cousin Cersei when Jamie is captured, which Tyrion uncovers and uses to blackmail Lancel into spying for him. He later has a religious experience after nearly dying and joins the Poor Fellows of the Faith of the Seven, gives up his incestuous relationship and tries to convert several of his family members (somewhat successfully with Kevan, unsuccessfully with Cersei). Still alive in the books.
**In the show, he reports Cersei to the High Sparrow (rather than the High Sparrow cleverly uncovering Cersei's plan and trapping her) and dies horribly. Cersei deliberately set him up for a particularly agonizing and drawn-out end; he's lured into a catacomb under the sept that contains a massive cache of wildfire, gets his spinal cord severed so he can't walk, and is left where he can see candles sitting in a pool of wildfire just a little too far away for him to reach it in time, so that he [[Grimdark|spends his last moments vainly trying to avert a horrible catastrophe before being incinerated]].
* Cersei and Robert's (actually Jaime's) children:
** Joffrey Baratheon: Spoiled brat and sociopath to the extreme. He's basically [[Sigvald]] during his teenage years (and likely inspired [[Phil Kelly|Kelly]] to make the character Sigvald). "Heir" of the throne, and the technical king of Westeros during the War of the Five Kings since he lives in King's Landing and sits on the throne. Turned out to be worse than Aerys. He died and there was much rejoicing. [[Fail|Except by his mother, who instead had sex on his corpse]]. Fourteen years old at the time of his death.
** Tommen Baratheon: The new king on the Iron Throne. Nine years old. Married to a teenaged shotacon wife who's (unknown to him) the granddaughter of his brother's true killer. Trying to litigate the criminalization of beets. Loves [[Cats|kittens]]. He's pretty well-rounded and non-fucked up, which is a miracle considering his parents, both putative and biological. Also seems to be trying to take kinging seriously, but his mom is trying to quash that in her subliminal attempt to hold power indefinitely, so whether it holds is another matter entirely. Prophesied to die before Cersei, which is doubly tragic due to his age and being a much better person than her.
**In the show, he commits suicide after Cersei blows up the Great Sept (head office of the fantasy knockoff Church of England), killing his godfather, great-uncle, wife, and all his religious friends, because of course her power hunger was more important than his happiness and well being.
** Myrcella Baratheon: Princess, and Cersei and "Robert's" second oldest child. Ten years old. In order to appease the Martells, Tyrion arranges a marriage with her and the youngest Martell, which pissed off everyone. In the books, she had her face fucked up because of Arianne Martell's amateur intrigues, which overlapped with poor planning, general stupidity, and another guy's backstabbing. Before the maiming, she was quite decent and non-evil. Who knows how she'll turn out now with half of her face cut off. Also prophesied to die before Cersei.
**In the show, she had a crush on Oberyn's surviving nephew but was killed by Elia in revenge for Oberyn's death, but alive in the books though missing an ear. Also, the readership all got on George's balls for maiming this girl, mostly because it was a sign that he had run out of ideas and was basically just milking Diabolus ex Machina ([[Just As Planned|or that's what he wants us to think]]).
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===House Baratheon===

''"Ours is the Fury"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Ascended to the Iron Throne after a successful rebellion against the Mad King Aerys II Targaryen. Produces no less than three claimants to the succession, each one very different from the other. Technically a cadet branch of House Targaryen as their founder Orys was allegedly a Targaryen bastard, who took the original Storm Kings (House Durrandon) deer sigil after killing the last one and fucking his only child Argella and then 200 odd years later, King Egg's daughter married their grandfather. They're pretty much the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Plantagenet House of Plantagenet].
* Robert Baratheon, ''The Usurper'': Fat, old, former badass who led the rebellion, and now the king who married Cersei Lannister. Then he fucked a bunch of other women and had lots of illegitimate kids. He was killed while mixing boar hunting and drinking, but whether this death was planned or not is uncertain. On the surface, a king with a thing for easy laughs and partying; right underneath the surface, he's irresponsible and leaves the actual ruling of a nation to his staff, deeper under the surface he's pretty much a sad, lonely old bro who would rather not have been king. Comparable to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_IV_of_England Henry IV], in that both were powerfully built military geniuses who overthrew the existing monarchy and later succumbed to an unhealthy lifestyle.
* Stannis '''The Mannis''' Baratheon: Robert's younger brother, an all-around badass who swings between [[Lawful Stupid]] (more so in the show than the books) and [[gets shit done|getting shit done]]. [[Judge Dredd|believes so strongly in the rule of law]] that he feels compelled to take the Iron Throne for himself despite wanting nothing to do with it. Is advised by a priestess of the God of light, Melisandre, and a lowborn smuggler named Davos Seaworth raised to knighthood and nobility. [[C.S Goto|His character is ruined in the show into an incompetent pawn of Melisandre and gets killed off just because one of the showrunners didn't like him]].
** Shireen Baratheon: Stannis's kid daughter. The sweet, charming, and intelligent little lady who was left with a deformity on her face from a disease called greyscale. Teaches Davos how to read, and is probably the most innocent person in the series alongside Tommen, Myrcella and a few others. Being the grim and dark universe A Song of Ice and Fire is, however, this means that she's likely going to end up becoming fuel for a vicious fire god. In the show she does, but in the books, she is safe and sound since Stannis isn't stupid enough to bring him with her while campaigning. His wife, on the other hand, being such an idiotic fanatical pyromaniac... well, her odds aren't exactly looking that great.
* Renly Baratheon, ''That Gay Guy'': Robert and Stannis's youngest brother. Took Loras Tyrell (a.k.a. Knight of Flowers, Pretty Boy, etc.) as his lover. Decided he was better suited to be king, though the bizarre and outdated laws of the land stated Stannis was next in line (though Joffrey and then Tommen were first since they were [[Pretend|officially]] Bobby B's legitimate kids). Was hugely popular since he had Robert's charisma, which led to him getting the most support, but he lacked Stannis's conviction and devotion to the duty of actually doing the work of a king, or even Robert's ability to wage war. Killed by Melisandre with some "help" by Stannis ''The Mannis'' for trying to steal his crown, though in the books Stannis may not have been completely aware of the role he played in Renly's death. He's basically [[That Guy]] of ASOIAF, since quite a lot of shit is his fault, indirectly or otherwise.
*Gendry Baratheon, the Bastard Son. One of Robert's many, many bastard children, and the one who gets the most page and screen time. He starts out as a humble blacksmith in King's Landing, who first comes to Ned's attention when Lord Stark is investigating the death of Jon Arryn. From there, he gets shipped off to the Night's Watch to avoid the imminent purge of Robert's bastards and winds up becoming friends with Arya and Hot Pie. After some adventuring and sexual tension with Arya (at least in the show), he joins the Brotherhood Without Banners. In the show, they sell him to Melisandre so she can use him for a blood magic ritual, while in the books he just goes on being a smith and doesn't get involved in anything particularly weird or shady. He's helping run an inn as a Brotherhood front/orphanage when he reappears in the books, but in the show, Ser Davos sets him free and tells him to fuck off, which he does for a few seasons. He eventually turns up back in King's Landing, where Davos finds him and recruits him (and his comically oversized LARPing hammer) for Team Snow. He helps Jon capture a wight to show Cersei, makes dragonglass weapons for the Army of the Living, hooks up with Arya, and fights in the Battle of Winterfell, after which Daenerys legitimizes him as the new lord of House Baratheon.</div></div>

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===House Tully===

''"Family, Duty, Honor"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> Lords of the central riverlands. Being the obligatory central nation they spend a lot of the series being fought over like a cake in between fat kids. Basically Poland/the Netherlands, given they have so many rivers and how hard they've been fucked over.
*Edmure Tully: Basically the SoIaF universe's eternal butt monkey (because he happens to be a decent fucking person). Despite being an okay guy, he's also a useless ponce with a dense streak a mile wide and a bad habit of bragging about things he shouldn't be proud of. It took hanging in a stockade for a few months to make him experience some growth. When Jaime was brought in to unfuck the situation and end the siege at Riverrun, Jaime's "negotiation" pressured him into convincing his house to surrender, but he made sure [[Troll|that Brynden got out first]]. In the books, he's currently spending his days at the Lannister house as a hostage to make sure that the Tullys don't try to ruin the situation again.
**In the show, he disappears until the final episode, [[Fail|where he tries to make a case for himself as king]] only to get shut down by Sansa.
*Lord Hoster Tully: In GoT the only act he committed of any note was to die. In the books however he is arguably, though inadvertently, the most destructive character once you've delved into his history. The man looked down upon peasants, cripples, bastards, and broken things, which influenced his daughters and primed them for their mistreatment of such through their travels (especially Catelyn's immediate suspicion of Tyrion, [[What|despite the charge and evidence making little sense, but because he's a "Monster" of course he must have done it]]). He denied Tywin's offer to marry Tyrion to Lysa for said reasons, but he also denied Lysa to marry Petyr because of his low birth and her value of being married off to a higher bidder, even if their age differed by at least 50 years and she was pregnant with Petyr's child. He responded to this pregnancy by forcefully aborting the child via drinking Moon Tea, without her knowledge (something he would have nightmares about approaching his death). Not only did this nearly cause her death, but it destroyed her reproductive system resulting in 5 miscarriages and 2 stillbirths (an event that would lead her to aggressive paranoia so fervent that she killed her husband to prevent being separated from her only living child). All of these actions unfortunately spiraled into helping cause The War of the Five Kings.
*Brynden Tully ''the Blackfish'': He didn't catch the memo that he was part of the joke faction, and proceeds to spend the entire series fucking Lannister shit up and generally being a boss. Thought to be the black sheep in a family of fish (Thus "Blackfish", geddit?), but in spite of that status held true to the family, continuing to hold Riverrun for Robb in spite of the war pretty much being lost. When Edmure surrendered Riverrun, he escaped by swimming under the portcullis and escaping into the river, causing everyone to shit themselves because he's totally coming for revenge. Also widely accepted by the fans to be a closeted homosexual.
**In the HBO show, he gets killed when resisting arrest from Tully forces by order of Edmure. [[Rage|And it happens offscreen.]]</div></div>

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===House Arryn===

''"As High as Honor"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Mountain lords turned [[NEET|neurotic shut ins]]. Goes through lords about as quickly as you would expect a castle equipped with a door that opens into empty air. Basically Switzerland/Afghanistan, seeing as how they stayed neutral in the War of Five Kings, their land is covered by nothing but mountains, and they're constantly fighting with the local tribes. They were being entertainingly screwed over by Littlefinger until his death.
*Jon Arryn: Only appears posthumously and is the catalyst for the whole plot. Used to be a foster father of sorts to Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark. Was the Robert's Malcador the Sigilite during Robert's Rebellion. He was killed by Littlefinger via Lysa when he figured out that Robert's kids are bastards of Cersei and Jaime. His death was blamed on the Lannisters to destabilize Westeros.
*Lysa Arryn: Loli bride turned Lady of the Vale after the Lannisters forcibly retired her husband from life, at least officially. In reality, Littlefinger convinced her to poison her husband and blame the Lannisters [[Just As Planned|which pretty much started this whole clusterfuck to begin with]]. A closeted, crazy woman who spends the entire series in her castle "the Eyrie" being useless, breastfeeding her own son at age 10, obsessing over Littlefinger's cock, and [[Derp|refusing to help her sister and nephew in the war she and Littlefinger pretty much started]], which may have guaranteed their eventual horrific murders by their enemies. Finally gets her comeuppance when Littlefinger kicks her out the moon door (post-taunting, of course), putting her out of our collective misery. Long live the Lord Protector.
* Robert Arryn: ''Littlefuck'', Lysa's equally mentally unstable autistic son, who still sucks on his mom's tit and enjoys seeing people "fly" out the moon door to their deaths. He actually seems to be a bit smarter than you would first think and is a really, really good judge of character, except with Sansa. Secretly being poisoned by Littlefinger and Sansa so she can take over the Vale and North. Named Robin in the show because the showrunners were afraid that having two characters with the same name would be too confusing. The show version doesn't get poisoned but turns up in the series finale as the Lord of the Vale.</div></div>

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===House Greyjoy===

''"We Do Not Sow"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">[[Awesome|A house founded by Cthulhu-worshipping Norscans]]. While not actual Vikings in any sense of the word, there is little other way to describe them. They live on some islands off the coast of Westeros and almost their entire culture is based around raiding and the ocean. Their religion holds it shameful for a man to pay for personal possessions, and states they have to get things either by trade, washing up from the ocean or the "Iron Price": seizing something from the body or belongings of someone he defeated in battle rather than paying or trading for it. Also, only possessions acquired via the Iron Price command respect among the Ironborn. The nastiest form this takes is stealing women as "Salt Wives", [[Emperor's Children|effectively making them a society of rapists]]. As an interesting bit of trivia, their local variety of baptism is to be ritually drowned in seawater and resuscitated by their priests, and they don't see drowning as a bad way to go on the grounds that it means their god/gods have accepted them and they'll go to an underwater Heaven that's basically a more X-rated version of The Little Mermaid.
*Balon Greyjoy: Asshole dad, crappy ruler, and general shithead (all very common things in this world, but still) who rebelled against Robert Baratheon and failed miserably. All of his sons were killed, except for Theon, who was taken as a hostage to ensure his good behaviour. Despite being in a position to join either the Lannisters or the Starks during the War of Five Kings and thereby get whatever he wanted from either (independence and the North, or independence and Casterly Rock, respectively), he does the absolute stupidest thing possible and declares himself independent without support from anyone, attacking the North and the rest of Westeros, thereby virtually guaranteeing that he'll be on the receiving end of another one-sided battle once everyone else has sorted their shit out. In the book he at least tried to make one alliance but it was with the freaking Lannisters and not the other Kingdom seeking independence. Never got that far, though, since he was pushed off a bridge during a storm by an assassin his brother Euron sent.
*Victarion Greyjoy: Admiral of the Iron Fleet. [[Gets shit done]] while wearing [[Dark Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|Lokhir Fellheart's]] armour during boarding actions. Does it for vengeance, the lulz and as a ticket to Ironborn heaven (which they believe men can reach if they die in battle or by drowning). Worships both R'hllor and the Drowned God. For all his badassery, is far too stupid to realize that his black Red Priest sidekick's constant rambling about his "great destiny" is inevitably going to end in his burning to death on a sacrificial pyre. Said Red Priest impressed Victarion by surviving being marooned at sea for 3 weeks and turning Victarion's infected arm into a super-strong volcano arm. Seriously. Isn't in the show, which is lame.
*Aeron Greyjoy ''Damphair'': [[Kostaltyn|A priestly Alan Moore who drank seawater]]. Once a fun-loving party animal, he nearly drowned during the Greyjoy Rebellion and became a dour and devout priest of the Ironborn [[Cthulhu]] religion. Confirmed to have been raped by Euron when they were kids. Planned to overthrow Euron, who bribed and manipulated his way into becoming king of the Ironborn. As of the excerpts from the sixth book, he [[Grimdark|Was captured by Euron and tortured to try and make him renounce his faith, including feeding him spoiled food, drugging him and burning him. Later Euron tied Aeron, naked, to the prow of Euron's ship alongside Euron's tortured, pregnant former lover because she showed Aeron kindness by once giving him proper food]]. He tried to console her by saying their suffering will end in underwater Valhalla, [[Awesome|showing Euron failed to make him deny his faith]]. Also left out of the show.
*Theon Greyjoy: Son of the Lord/King of the Iron Islands. Had the personality of a stereotypical high school jock, being an excellent archer and womanizer and proud of it. He was given to Ned Stark by his father after Balon failed to successfully rebel against Robert Baratheon. Swore an oath to Robb, but then ditched him out of a desperate need to please his father. Ends up castrated and acts as the personal slave of Ramsay Bolton after Ramsay puts him through horrific torture to turn him into Reek. Rescued by his sister, but the psychological trauma meant it took a while before he could stop calling himself Reek and start getting back to normal mentally (physically he's now missing a few parts that don't heal or grow back). He's just been reunited with his sister in the books, but is dead in the show, thanks to charging the Night King by himself while protecting Bran.
* Asha Greyjoy: Theon's older sister and a commander of some renown which is quite a feat - almost every man on the Iron Islands except her father either tried to get in her pants or told her to [[-4 STR|stop playing around and go do some actual women's work]], before she kicked enough ass that they respected her. Rescues Theon after he escapes Ramsay but then loses him to Stannis. Is named Yara in the show because the showrunners thought her name sounded too similar to Osha the wildling chick and is also apparently [[PROMOTIONS|bisexual]]. Eventually becomes Lady of the Iron Islands in the show because she's the last Greyjoy standing. Kind of a Han-Solo-Stand-in character-wise, being a brash, aggressive pirate queen that acts very opportunistically, but underneath her badassery she has a soft heart for people she cares about (mostly Theon and her crew) and a strong sense of justice.
*Euron Greyjoy ''Crow's Eye'': A [[Chaos Warrior|sick fuck Lovecraftian pirate armed with unnatural sorcerous powers]] and so evil that Balon banished him from the Iron Islands. Every member of his crew is a mute because Euron ripped all their tongues out. Many of them are also the illegitimate sons [[Beastmen|of women he's raped around the world during his raids]]. Uses an eyepatch to conceal a pitch-black eye, his personal "obviously a villain" mark. Raped his brother Victarion's wife, then claimed she wanted it so Victarion had to kill her. Raped his younger brother Aeron. Also showed back up in the Iron Islands the day after Balon died, despite having been raping and pillaging in Essos before that, which is suspicious as fuck. Now the new Iron King. Plans to conquer Westeros and has some unknown plan to deal with Daenerys. Revealed in the book ''Winds of Winter'' to be [[Erebus|one of the sickest fucks in an entire setting of sick fucks (and that's saying something)]], including having a god complex while hating religion so much he [[Grimdark|tortures any clergymen he captures to try and make them give up their faiths using ironic tortures themed around their religions - such as preachers have their tongues cut out and burning priests of the fire god to death]]. Euron tried and failed to break his priest brother Aeron's faith so he lashed Aeron to the front of his ship to die [[Grimdark|alongside Euron's own pregnant lover Falia]], in what could be preparations for the [[Betrayal at Calth|ruinstorm]].
**In the show he's just a psycho pirate turned king without any magic powers or gear [[FAIL|who wants to bang Cersei. Jaime kills him in the second-to-last episode in one of the dumbest moments in an already terrible episode.]]
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===House Tyrell===

''"Growing Strong"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Lords of Highgarden and the Reach, backstabbers par-excellence, and owners of a lot of fertile lanf. Of the Seven Kingdoms, the Reach is the "biggest," having the most people, the largest army, and a stable agrarian economy; yes, the Westerlands is richer, yes, the Stormlands have/had the strongest military, and yes, the Vale is the most honor-and-chivalry obsessed, but the Reach and the Tyrells are the only ones who can compete with all three at once. Unlike the current lot of Lannisters they understand the value of good PR, balancing ruthlessness with being somewhat amicable to the commoners, politically savvy and not being stuck-up on honour (which they still have more of than the Lannisters do). They're a bit analogous to France. In the books, it's the Tyrells and their support that keeps the throne afloat post-Robert, first aiding Joffrey and then Tommen. They were "shrewd" enough to stay out of Robert's Rebellion and outside of his court while Tywin was in charge, so their lands are basically untouched by war: the Reach's cities are also the most beautiful, with Highgarden and Oldtown being notable for not smelling like shit and full of garbage. [[Fail|Unfortunately, they've all been wiped out in the show]].

*Mace "The Ace" Tyrell: Lord of Highgarden. Massively fat and overweight, while being stupid, overreaching and constantly mocked by everyone else, he's otherwise known as a friendly man, a good Lord when it comes to management and a good father; in the books, the Iron Throne uses him to print gold and alleviate hunger during the War of the Five Kings, so they give him and his family a bunch of positions to keep them invested. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to save a man in the Game of Thrones. In the books, he's just been named Hand of the King as part of Kevan Lannister's plan to keep his house on-side. In the show he gets killed with the rest of the noble houses when Cersei blows up the Great Sept of Baelor.
*Olenna Tyrell: The brains behind House Tyrell's schemes. Known as the ''Queen of Thorns'' for being an outspoken, prickly and venomous old lady. Schemed with Littlefinger to have Joffrey killed, but she carried it out with compressed powder "gems" hidden in Sansa's hairnet that poisoned his wine. She is to the Tyrells as Tywin is to the Lannisters, except her daughter isn't a narcissistic sociopath.
**Alive and well in the books (so far), where she's pretty much the same as the show. She has chosen Margaery as her successor, which is why she made sure she'd be engaged to Tommen and had Joffrey offed.
**Became a fan-favorite for constantly dropping awesome one-liners and calling out smug and/or unpopular characters like Littlefinger and the Sand Snakes. [[Fail|Killed off in the show]] as Jaime gives her the option of drinking painless poison or whatever Cersei wanted to do to her after his forces capture Highgarden. Olenna took the poison, and before she died [[Awesome|revealed to Jaime that she was the one who killed Joffrey and told him to make sure Cersei knows it]].
*Willas Tyrell: Mace Tyrell's eldest son and heir, crippled at a very young age when jousting against Oberyn Martell. Surprisingly, he and Oberyn are still bros, even though the rest of their Houses aren't very fond of each other because of this incident. Probably one of the most pleasant and sensible characters in the books, which might explain why they never included him in the TV show. Very fond of breeding animals, especially horses.
*Garlan Tyrell ''The Gallant'': Second-born son. Badass extraordinaire, considered one of the best swordsmen in Westeros, and one of the few people who's kind to Tyrion. Trains for real combat (often against multiple opponents by himself) unlike Loras, who's a tourney fighter. Single-handedly wrecks many notable knights fighting for Stannis during the War of The Five Kings. And he is the only person other than Tywin to put Joffrey in his place, at his own wedding. Sadly no POV chapter yet and omitted from the TV series (Loras takes credit for his deeds).
*Loras Tyrell ''The Knight of Flowers'': The Tyrell who appears most in the TV series, since his older brothers got adapted out. Considered to be an example of the perfect knight, despite his youth. Is secretly Renly's gay lover and conspired to take the throne with him and his sister. He was elevated to the Kingsguard as part of the Lannisters' appeasement of the Tyrells, but also to ensure that Margaery would be safe if it turned out they couldn't kill Joff/Tommen turned out to be a sociopath too. Last seen badly injured in the books attempting to take Stannis' castle in order to to prove his honor after the Faith Militant locked up his sister, but because none of Cersei's sources could visually confirm it, it's likely that the Tyrells ([[Iron warriors|it was ''their'' forces that did the sieging]], after all) fabricated a story to get their boy out of there. In the show he ends up tortured by the members of the Faith for being gay [[C.S Goto|because the showrunners retconned them to hate gay people]], [[Protectorate of Menoth|later joins their ranks of questionable willingness]], then dies when Cersei blows up the Sept of Baelor.
*Margaery Tyrell: The would-be Queen of Westeros, she has married, in order, Renly Baratheon (gay), Joffrey Baratheon (evil), and Tommen Baratheon (8 years old) and has been crowned as queen three times. While she is nice, like Disney Princess-in-a-grimdark-setting-nice, she is still her grandmother's protege, and so is the source of Cersei's paranoia (which is kinda valid as the Tyrells did off Joffrey so that Margy could marry the more-controllable and non-sociopathic Tommen). Cersei was so paranoid about Marge's ascension that she decided to legitimize the Sparrows and allow them to reform the [[Age of Apostasy|Faith Militant]], all because she was afraid Tommen would listen to Margaery more than her.
**In the show, she marries and uses sex to control Tommen, because the show needed to hit its titty quota and because Tommen is a teenager in the show. Was arrested by the resident Chamber Militant, the Sparrows, and asked for a trial by faith in the books. In the show, this also happens but she tries to be pious in an attempt to save herself but ends up getting killed when Cersei blows up the Sept of Baelor.
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===House Martell===

''"Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken"''
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[[Tallarn|Desert dwelling survivalists]] who [[Dune|pride themselves on having never been conquered]] by the Targaryen dynasty (though they later married in). Moorish Spaniards, kinda. Their entire thing is that they're nothing like the rest of the Seven Kingdoms: they're descended from the Rhoynar, a group of people that used to live along one of Essos' longest rivers who practice absolute cognatic (the oldest child, regardless of gender, inherits the throne) succession and take a very liberal attitude towards sex. House Martell also has a rocky relationship with the rest of the kingdom: The Baratheons don't trust them because they were all Targaryen loyalists, the Reach doesn't like them because of historic wars between the two, and House Martell has never forgiven House Lannister for Clegane's rape and murder of Elia Martell, Rhaegar's first wife and mother of his children.
[[C.S Goto|Their story arc was completely ruined in the show, as Elia and Oberyn's daughters kill Oberyn's brother and nephew for taking too long to avenge him before being captured and killed themselves by Euron and Cersei]].
*Doran Martell: Lord of Sunspear and of royal descent. Still mad at the Lannisters about that whole "murdered-my-sister-and-infant-niece thing". Playing the longest of long games with Varys, which blew up in his face because he told ''no one in his family'' about his schemes (well, maybe Oberyn, but Oberyn is dead).
**[[What|Killed off in the show by Ellaria as part of her plan to avenge Oberyn]]. Even his actor was upset.
*Arianne Martell: One of GRRM's characters who seems to exists solely to fuck everything up at the worst conceivable moment. Still hot as Dornish girls come. See, she is technically the heir of Dorne, being the ''first-born'' daughter, and yet was shut out of most of her father's meetings and plans, which caused her to get upset because even Oberyn treats all of his bastards better than her dad treats her. After Doran ''seemingly'' accepts his own brother's death without any sort of fuss, she decides that her father is weak and plans to start ''another'' front in the War of Five Kings by putting Myrcella up on the throne. However, one of her dad's spies gives them up, and in a huge clusterfuck, Myrcella gets maimed by one of the pro-war knights. She is then taken to her father, who finally spills the beans on his grand scheme: the reason why she was sidelined by her father was because he had secretly betrothed her to her Viserys, but now that Viserys is dead, plans to see if he can broker an alliance with "Aegon," Rhaegar and Elia's son who "supposedly" was secreted away and replaced with doubles.
*Oberyn Martell ''The Viper of Dorne'': Doran Martell's brother, a bisexual swinger, former mercenary, and a drunkard (and also Inigo Montoya in Dark Fantasy). His girlfriend is a spectacularly beautiful bastard named Ellaria Sand and he has many illegitimate children, mostly daughters, collectively called "The Sand Snakes". Crippled the Tyrell heir in a joust, causing a rift between the two houses; despite this, he's actually best mates with the aforementioned heir, due to Willas Tyrell being straight up the nicest and most balanced man in the series and Oberyn being a very decent person. Known for poisoning his weapons, as well as his battle-cry. Died from a mutual kill, with Gregor Clegane crushing his skull in rather graphically, but Oberyn getting the last laugh, since he got Clegane with a horribly painful and slow-acting venom which stretched his death over days or even weeks, during which time he was ruthlessly experimented upon by a mad scientist, meaning he avenged his sister Elia who Gregor had raped and murdered. [[Sanguinius|So to sum it up, he's a spear-wielding badass whose death in battle against a major villain was deeply traumatizing for all in-universe and out]].

*Quentyn Martell: Didn't realize he was in Dark Low Fantasy and thought he was in High Fantasy, poor bastard. A member of House Martell, sent to marry Daenerys to secure an alliance between the families since the original marriage plan to hook Arianne up with Viserys won't work with Viserys dead. Leaves Westeros and goes all the way to the city of Meereen to marry her, but he's too late, as she marries the Meereenese noble Hizdahr, and like Jorah he's not her type (Dany likes her bad boys). Tries to tame two of her dragons to impress her; the attempt goes wrong, he gets horribly burnt and gradually dies in agony from his wounds.
*The Sand Snakes: Oberyn's children. All daughters he had with various women throughout his travels (all consensual encounters, mind you, which actually says a lot about Westeros that it has to be said). Mixed race and all hot with various skills including combat training and mastery of poisons. Working with Doran and Ellaria in the books.
**[[C.S Goto|Ruined in the show where they don't accomplish anything, are given atrocious dialogue (the "you need the bad pussy" line comes to mind), aren't great fighters and get killed by Euron's men, except for the one who poisoned Myrcella; she gets captured and poisoned back by Cersei so an imprisoned Ellaria is forced to watch her die and decompose.]]</div></div>

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===House Bolton===

''"Our Blades Are Sharp"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The Starks' most important (and most despised) vassal, a former arch-rival made of [[Grimdark]] because their entire theme [[Dark Eldar|revolves around Torture]] and they're [[Night Lords|thoroughly awful, dishonorable, sadistic cowards who can be counted on to do every dirty trick possible before even trying to fight fair. Their sigil is a crucified and flayed man]], their castle is [[Commorragh|a complex of constant suffering called the Dreadfort]], and just look at their House motto...all of which shows how stupid the Starks were for thinking they could control them. Tied with Red Wedding collaborators the Freys as the most thoroughly vile house in the entire setting (no mean feat, all things considered).
*Roose Bolton, ''The 'Leech Lord'': A Lawful Evil sociopathic health nut who's called the Leech Lord because he gets leeched regularly, believing they get rid of bad blood. Second-most powerful Lord in the North with ambitions to depose the Starks. Since the Starks are mostly unable to think like crafty people and are blinded by excessive honour this doesn't prove too difficult. He gets his wish when he stabs Robb Stark in the back, at his uncle's wedding no less, and has anyone associated with Robb killed. He then makes over Winterfell in his bloody image and is currently trolling Stannis. Believes in the abolished practice of "[[Rape|Droit du seigneur]]" (a tradition that allowed a lord to have sex with subordinate women, whether they wanted to or not) and killed at least one man for trying to hide his wife from Roose (before fathering Ramsay with her via rape). Believed that he and his son could be as evil as they wanted as long as no one found out. Killed by Ramsey in the show, which Ramsay tried to cover with a lie despite the witnesses to his actions. May also be dead in the books, since the letter Jon receives from Winterfell in book five is addressed from Lord Ramsay Bolton.
*Ramsay Snow/Bolton: <s>A Dark Elf with shaved ears in the wrong universe</s>. <s>The Joker of Westeros</s>. The Chaotic Evil incarnate bastard son of Roose Bolton and a peasant woman he raped [[Grimdark|(under the hanging corpse of the woman's husband, for fuck's sake!)]]. One of the most fucked up people in all of the Seven Kingdoms (alongside the Mountain, Joffrey, the original Reek, the pedophile marauder Rorge and Euron), because he [[Dark Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|loves to torture and kill people openly for the lulz]], such as Theon Greyjoy, who he crippled, knocked his teeth out, castrated, and brainwashed into calling himself Reek. Reek was originally a peasant appointed to try and control a young Ramsay, but instead Ramsay warped him into a mentally unstable necrophiliac before killing Reek to fake his death, but Ramsay seemed to hold some twisted affection for him. He also sent Theon's severed appendage to Theon's dad in a cutesy box with a letter mockingly detailing his evilness. Will torture anyone who points out his illegitimate heritage even though now he's legally recognized as a Bolton. Also has a pack of hunting dogs he names after women he hunts, rapes and kills. Married a fake Arya Stark and regularly mistreats her, including forced bestiality. Not a fun guy to be around. The only reason he's gotten away with it for so long (as pointed out by his father) is that no one is strong enough to stand up to him yet, but [[Powder Keg of Justice|when they are]] he's going to be killed (especially if his fate in the show is anything to go by).
**In the show, he killed his father with a knife, fed his stepmother and newborn half-brother to his dogs, then married Sansa Stark and deflowered her via rape. Ramsay was such a monster even Iwan Rheon, THE ACTOR WHO PLAYED THE GUY, hoped he'd die horribly. He got his wish: The consequences of Ramsay's actions catch up with him when Jon Snow shows up with an army capable of threatening him, and after surprise reinforcements from Littlefinger and his own fucked-up teamkilling, the Starks crush the Bolton army, forcing Ramsay to flee back to Winterfell. Despite this, the gate is smashed down, and Jon disarms him and beats him quite brutally before detaining him to await trial. Before the trial Sansa sets his dogs on him, which he had deliberately starved so they would eat Jon. Apparently they found him quite tasty. For all that Season 6 of GoT is Skub, there likely aren't many who would object to this moment.
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===House Frey===

''"We Stand Together"''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> House of weasels who are always grumpy and have a thing for overreacting to perceived slights. Wouldn't be that important except for the fact that they own the only bridge over a strategically important river, and regularly extort anyone attempting to cross it...that, and performing the Red Wedding, AKA the Magnum Opus of Grimdark that single-handedly ensures they're [[Marines Malevolent|the most hated fucks in the whole setting in-universe and out.]] Simply put, there is '''nothing''' good or nice you can say about the Freys. They're ugly inside and out, cruel, treacherous, thoroughly dishonorable, and aren't even strong warriors, being a mix of incompetent dumbasses and sadistic cowards. They'd all make excellent Skaven (especially considering they could stand to be killed by some Lizardmen).

*Walder Frey: The ancient, terrible, ornery old man in charge of the Twins. Universally detested by his peers (and the audience) for being an amoral, sociopathic opportunist, which he returns in kind for said peers "looking down on him" (can't imagine why), and will readily betray an important ally for immediate gain, or if he feels he has been slighted in some minor way, with the aforementioned Red Wedding being the most infamous example of both. His descendants are literally so numerous that no one except GRRM himself has been able to count them all, so we aren't even going to attempt it (not helped by quite a few of them being named Walder as well). Now dead in the show due to getting his throat slit by a vengeful Arya after she serves him two of his sons as meat pies. </div></div>

===Minor Houses and non-Houses===
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'''Night's Watch'''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The Night's Watch are an apolitical force in charge of manning The Wall, a giant ice wall that separates the relative tranquillity of the south from the Lovecraftian fucked-up-itude of the true north. They are chronically undermanned and undersupplied since nobody believes their stories of a barbarian army or the impending zombie apocalypse. Basically everybody else thinks they're in a game of [[Diplomacy]] and the Night's Watch are the only ones who realize they're actually in [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]], though it's been so long since the last snow elf invasion that even they had forgotten about the undead hordes and focused too much on barbarians. Too add to their problems, they are overwhelmingly comprised of petty criminals who wanted to avoid the hangman, because "taking the black", as it's colloquially known, also brings with it a full pardon for any crime committed, even murder and treason (even rape, though rapists tend to be despised among the Night's Watch). Taking the black isn't also very popular, as a common joke in the Seven Kingdoms is that out 10 people, only would one would willfully take the black, the rest would rather get hanged. They also frequently serve as a convinient catch-all solution for Lords and nobles who fell out of favor, committed treason or were outwitted in the endless Westerosi wheel of politics; lucky for them because said Lords and Nobles are usually the only ones with any fighting experience that are part of the watch and make up their leadership. They've allied with the Wildings and the North, but in the TV show, the Night's King used the undead dragon Viserion to burn a hole through The Wall.
*Jeor Mormont, ''The Old Bear'': 997th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch at the start of the series. Sees Jon Snow as something of a second son (since his own son Jorah was exiled for enslaving and refused to take the black for his crimes). Leads a ranging north of the Wall to investigate reports that the Others have returned. Ends up killed during a mutiny of survivors after the Others wiped out most of his force.
*Alliser Thorne: Prick of a knight who was favourite to be the next Watch Commander, but was passed over by Jon Snow. Unable to accept Jon Snow letting the Wildlings live on the other side of the wall in an alliance against the zombie hordes, he staged a coup against Jon. It failed because Jon was brought back to life. He is now dead in the show, having been executed for his treason by Jon Snow. Despite of his many personal failings, he's one of the very few capable fighters (and a pretty good one, even) of the Watch and a skilled commander. Took the Black after siding with the Targaryens during the Sack of King's Landing in the civil war.
*Aemon Targaryen: Maester of the Citadel at Castle Black. Despite being the third born son of King Maekar I Targaryen, he declined the right to sit on the Iron Throne. One of the few people in the series to die of old age, at 102.
*Samwell Tarly, ''The Slayer'': Fat bookworm who was forced to take the black after his father Randyl threatened to murder him for being unmanly. Jon Snow's best friend among the Night's Watch, and knows everything because he "read it in a book". Despite being a self-professed coward, Sam became the first person in thousands of years to slay an Other with an obsidian dagger. George Martin himself said Sam's based on Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings. Since then, he has started improving his combat skills and balls (in more ways than one for the latter, finding his spine and losing his virginity). He abandons the Night's Watch to help fight the dead and tell Jon who he really is, and winds up becoming the new Grand Maester by the end of the show.
*Eddison Tollett, ''Dolorous Edd'': Probably the most badass member of the Night's Watch. Responds to situations by making sarcastic jokes about them, and known for being a grim motherfucker in a setting of grim motherfuckers. In the show he [[Awesome|became the new Lord Commander]] while Jon was dead, but gave the title back to Jon when he was brought back to life, and then Jon handed it right back because he needed to go sort out Ramsay Bolton. Dies in Season 8 at the Battle of Winterfell.
*Benjen Stark: The [[Dune|Duncan Idaho]] of this series, the dead guy all the other characters and all the ''readers'' love so much someone has to bring him back from the dead in later books. Benjen is Eddard Stark's youngest brother and the prime motivation why Jon wants to join the Night's Watch in the first place. Joined the Watch for reasons unknown and disappears without a trace even before Jon arrives. In the TV series, he returns as a benevolent Wight that retained his free will and helps Bran to get back to the Seven Kingdoms.
*Qhorin Half-Hand: Badass extraordinaire that killed a shitton of Wildlings in his long time of service, rumoured to have spent more time north of the Wall than anyone living southerner in the setting. Lets himself get killed by Jon in a gambit to earn Mance Rayders respect.
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'''Wildlings'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Groups of nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes who live north of the Wall. Mostly First Men by blood, they have been heading toward the Wall for the past decade with the reputed reemergence of the Others. Nomadic, aggressive, and very much believing in "might makes right", they do not get along with anyone south of The Wall since they view them as "Kneeling weaklings". Basically every Celtic/Scandinavian/barbarian stereotype combined.
*Mance Rayder, ''The King Beyond The Wall'': A Wildling orphan who was taken in by the Night's Watch, he became their best Ranger before he deserted to join his people. He united the Wildlings and lead them south to escape the Others. Also a trained bard, but that was not enough to save him from death in the show while he's merely MIA in the books.
*Tormund Giantsbane: Claims to have a ten-inch penis, and invites his enemies to use their mouths if they want to clean it. Cool as fuck old guy who [[Furry|fucks mother-bears]] in his free time. Tough as nails motherfucker who preaches the merits of using one's cock for everything. He teams up with Jon Snow for the fight against the White Walkers, then fucks off back to the north once the Night King is dead, making him one of the most sensible people on the show. He and Jon go off to be bros at the end of the show.
*Ygritte: Wildling woman who Jon Snow ends up falling for and who returns his affections. Has red hair which is considered lucky among the Wildlings. This being ''A Song of Ice and Fire'', she ends up dying because her worldview is not compatible with Jon's.
*Craster: A sick bastard, formerly a member of the Night's Watch turned polygamous isolationist. By the way, [[Grimdark|his current wives are his many daughters and granddaughters who he fucks regularly to have more children. Girls grow up to become more wives, boys get sacrificed to the Others]]. This keeps the Others at bay - and is implied to be a way the Others reproduce themselves, and that sanctuary is why the Night's Watch barely tolerates him. Fortunately, he's been killed off in the story and his offspring go their separate ways.
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'''Commoners, Knights, and Petty Lords'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Basically any character not associated with any of the Great Houses.
* Varys, ''The Spider'': The eunuch spymaster of Westeros. You can't take a shit in the Seven Kingdoms without Varys finding out where, when, and how watery or dry it was. He does this through paid informants and his "little birds", a spy network of children who sneak through the castle's passageways and air flues to eavesdrop on everyone. Somewhat of a paradoxical character, since his literal dicklessness, reputation and political power make every character extremely vary of him (it's more or less implied that the main thing keeping him in the small council is the fact that he has got enough shit on everyone to blackmail them into submission if they would dare step out of his line) but under the surface, he is the rare example of people in Westeros that isn't an entirely self-serving scumbag and seems to show genuine care and concern for the common folk [[Just as planned|(Even if his machinations frequently put commonors in peril, but hey, such is politics)]]. To that end, he manipulated events that, according to his plan, would end with a Targaryen on the throne, to permanently stabilize the realm and rid it of the aformentioned self-serving idiots. On a sidenote, he's one of the few, if not the only person to fully comprehend how dangerous Littlefinger actually is. In the books, he's currently trying to install an adolescent Targaryen on the Iron Throne (who probably isn't even one, but he got the looks) Dead in the show, having decided to try and put Jon on the throne instead of Daenerys; Jon says no, Tyrion sells him out when he realizes Jon absolutely means it, and Dany has Drogon barbecue him.
* Petyr Baelish, ''Littlefinger'': The Master of Coin (the ASOIAF equivalent of a treasurer) and the closest person the Game of Thrones world has to a [[Daemon Prince]] of [[Tzeentch]], up to even declaring "[[Chaos]] is a Ladder". A dangerous manipulator who manages to trick and steal his way to positions of lordship and wealth because no one takes him seriously, and stabs all the Lannisters in the back when they become inconvenient. As a child, he wanted Catelyn Stark and was tricked into thinking she wanted him when her sister Lysa fucked him while he was drunk. Challenged Catelyn's betrothed Brandon Stark, Ned's older brother who was murdered by Aerys, for her hand in marriage and got his ass kicked because he was a small skinny boy and Brandon Stark was a big strapping man, making that his start of darkness. The guy responsible, directly or indirectly, for the War of the Five Kings because he was the mastermind behind poisoning Jon Arryn, the capture and execution of Ned Stark, feeding several half-truths to Catelyn to motivate her to arrest Tyrion, and eventually Joffrey's death by having Dontos and Olenna Tyrell carry out the plan to kill Joffrey and letting Tyrion take the fall; but no one in the story knows this, not even Varys. People think he can pull gold out of thin air, but he's really been buying debt while letting Robert Baratheon's extravagances and Joffrey and Cersei's dipshittery pull the country into a serious debt of its own. So he's pledged himself to [[Chaos]] and destroying Westeros all because he couldn't have Catelyn as his girlfriend, though he changed his focus to her daughter Sansa now, making him a pedophile. Hasn't yet got his comeuppance in the books, but is currently dead in the show after he was out-gambitted by Sansa and killed by Arya (though the less said about how well executed this was, the better). According to GRRM, he's based on the title character from the Great Gatsby, even though he only really resembles the character when putting on an act. [[Erebus|Basically has the role of a treacherous figure who gives bad advice on purpose and is responsible for the series of events that lead to a massive, devastating war with horrible consequences, making him one of the vilest folks in the 'verse]].
*Gregor Clegane, ''The Mountain'': A 7' 8" 400 pound mass of testosterone, muscles, steroid overdose, [[Slaanesh|utter disregard for consent]], [[Khorne|and murderous RAGE]], Gregor is Tywin Lannister's top muscle. Killed his own father and sister and permanently scarred his brother. [[Beastmen|Hobbies include rape, arson, murder, and random torture]]; he's also been married a few times but not now with the implication he kept killing his wives. He played an important part in destroying the Targaryens by killing a couple of Rhaegar's kids in rather brutal fashion, then raping and murdering his wife. Spends a few novels doing Tywin's dirty work before a Trial by Champion leads to him dying after being poisoned by Oberyn Martell. Qyburn later resurrected him as... something... called "Ser Robert Strong", and is now even stronger, less prone to psychotic rages, and is completely obedient. He's based on accounts of French knight Gilles de Rais and maybe also the scriptural giant Goliath. In the show he goes on to torture Cersei's nun jailer to death in a brutal and unspecified fashion kills Qyburn during the Siege of King's Landing and then nearly kills his little brother, only for Sandor to tackle him through a collapsing wall and into a gigantic inferno that claims both. [[Honsou|Standing out as one of ''the'' evilest pieces of shit in a world filled with them]], to the point that even the author himself has labeled him the worst character in the series.
* Sandor Clegane, ''The Hound'': Younger brother to Gregor Clegane, called the Hound because of his hound-face helm, his family's heraldry, and being the king's hired muscle without being a knight. He hates knights due to the hypocrisy of being a professional "noble warrior" but mostly since his monstrous brother is a knight, showing it's not so much of a noble promotion. Terrified of fire after Gregor put his head against a brazier for playing with one of Gregor's old toys when they were children, burning half his face, but he's still the second-strongest person in Westeros. A brutal anti-hero with a soft spot for Sansa, but a better person than his brother. After falling sick from Biter's nasty teeth, he ends up being a silent monk burying people in the Silent Isles. In the show, he joins the Brotherhood without Banners and goes north to help fuck up the White Walkers. As of Season 8, he's survived the Battle of Winterfell and is riding south with Arya to put the boots to Gregor. Dies killing his now undead brother in a pretty epic fight amidst the crumbling ruins of the Red Keep.
*Grand Maester Pycelle: A shrewd, dangerous man putting on a "harmless old man act" and a high ranking scholar from the science/medical guild the Maesters. The longest-serving member of the King's advisory staff, and is actually Tywin Lannister's biggest lackey. He convinced the Mad King to let Tywin in as Baratheon's armies were marching on the capital, where Tywin proceeded to sack the city and claim it for Robert. Gets his head bashed in by Varys in the books and murdered by Qyburn in the show.
* Qyburn: Formerly a maester, who was kicked out of the order for unethical experiments on the living (taking people and performing vivisections to be precise). Introduced as a part of a mercenary company serving Roose Bolton, which should be a red flag. He moves up in the world when he's sent to escort Brienne and Jaime back to King's Landing and ends with Cersei employing him to replace Pycelle as "science advisor" and eventually Varys's Spymaster. Serves Cersei loyally as long as she lets him indulge his sick experiments, serving as a black magic variety of the court mage. He has resurrected Gregor Clegane as... something. [[Fabius Bile]] if he traded his robot limbs, eugenics and power armour for necromancy. He overestimated his hold on Gregor and got his head caved in for it as of the second-to-last episode of the show.
*Barristan Selmy, ''The Bold'': Knight of the Kingsguard. Which Kingsguard? Take your pick. He's served pretty much every king since Aerys and understandably feels pretty bad about it. Another sad old man who pretty much just wants to die until he decides to go pledge his services to Daenerys. Even in his old age, he is considered one of the most dangerous men in Westeros. [[Fail|Dead in the show]] (to be fair they gave him a huge last stand), but [[Awesome|alive]] and [[Roboute Guilliman|appointed himself Daenerys' steward in her absence to try and fix Meereen's situation in the books]].
*Melisandre, ''The Red Witch'': A priestess of R'hllor, the god of fire. Proclaimed Stannis to be the messiah-king and is doing everything in her power to make sure he wins (considerable given that she can scry, make shadow baby assassins and set things on fire with her mind). She'd be pretty bro-tier if her god wasn't so vicious. As it stands she's kind of in the grey (in the books, the show seems to zig-zag on her being evil 'cos the showrunners seem to hate religion). Most of the people she set on fire deserved it, and she hasn't ''succeeded'' in killing any babies yet. Show version now dead from suicide via rapid ageing after ensuring the Living defeat the Dead.
*Jorah Mormont: A knight and son of Jeor Mormont, exiled for trying to sell poachers into slavery and eventually joining the exiles of House Targaryen. He is offered a pardon in exchange for spying on the Targaryens but ultimately decides to stay with them after falling in love with Daenerys. Unfortunately, he gets friend-zoned hard. Despite saving her life from an assassin while she was pregnant, she still votes him off the Khalassar after learning he was a spy. He still loves her and follows her in secret, though. In the show, he goes on a quest to prove himself to her and contracts the dangerous disease Greyscale (it's like the unholy lovechild of smallpox and leprosy), but he gets cured and is now back at her side. He dies protecting her at the Battle of Winterfell.
*[[This Guy|Davos Seaworth]], ''The Onion Knight'': A former smuggler and bannerman to House Baratheon, and a top-tier hype man, pulling speeches out on the spot on several occasions to convince people to support Stannis and later Jon. One of the most Noblebright characters in the setting, which really isn't bad for a man that only just now learned how to read. During Roberts Rebellion he ran a blockade with a cargo of contraband onions to a castle Stannis Baratheon was besieged in. In exchange for the food he had, Stannis knighted Davos, [[Rules Lawyer|but Stannis's law-worshipping mindset compelled him to remove four digits from his left hand]]. Despite this, Davos has served Stannis with unquestioning loyalty, because Stannis knighting him gave his children a future. The fact that Stannis's war for the throne has ended up killing several of his sons hasn't dented his loyalty at all. **Doesn't like Melisandre because he sees her as a user and her beliefs as brutal. He's a devout follower of the Faith of the Seven in the books and the first season of the show [[C.S Goto|but is clumsily retconned into an anti-religious atheist in later show seasons]]. In the show, he's now pledged to DA NORF and is basically Jon's Hand of the King, except he doesn't get a fancy pin. He survives the Battle of Winterfell and the Second Sack of King's Landing and becomes Master of Ships in the final episode of the show.
*Shae: A former camp follower and Tyrion Lannister's squeeze for most of the story. Fled from an abusive family and became a camp follower to earn a living. Seems to fall in love with Tyrion, but it turns out she's a gold-digging bitch. When Tyrion doesn't marry Shae she sells him out to Cersei for a better offer, then fucks Tywin when she realizes Cersei won't keep her promise. Tyrion found her in his father's bed and strangled her to death with a necklace for betraying him. The discovery of Shae's corpse in Tywin's bed - posthumously outing him as a whoremonger - upsets Cersei to the point she unpersons Shae.
*Bronn: A mercenary who acts as Tyrion's enforcer and personal killer until Cersei outbids him and he settles down with a little wife and title. Routinely kills knights by exploiting how arrogant and stupid they are even after becoming one himself. Only in it for the money, which he'll happily tell you himself. The only character other than Littlefinger to end every book in a better position than he started it. In the show, he makes the very sensible decision to sit out the fighting and wait for his promised castle (Riverrun if Cersei wins, Highgarden if Daenerys wins). He gets Highgarden and is named Lord Paramount of the Reach and Master of Coin in the final episode. Some nobles bitch about the idea of an upjumped thug receiving such high and exalted positions until he points out that their Houses were probably founded by people a lot like him.
* Brienne of Tarth, ''The Beauty'': Surprisingly badass lady knight wannabe (since no women can be knighted), legendarily unattractive but still pretty idealistic despite the shit she gets for her looks. Fate frequently gives her the shit end of the stick, because no matter how hard she tries to finish her quests, she ends up failing or stuff happens that makes it impossible. Secretly crushes on Renly and unaware he's gay. After he dies, Brienne switches her loyalty to Catelyn and helps her bring Jaime to King's Landing as Tyrion promised Sansa's return in exchange for Jaime. She later developed a crush on Jaime. Things don't go well because Jaime lost his hand and the Red Wedding happened. Next, Jaime sends her out to find and keep Sansa safe to make good on Tyrion's promise, since he isn't the complete dick everyone thinks he is. Brienne ends up getting captured by Cat, now known as Lady Stoneheart and an insane undead, who was going to hang Brienne for working with Jaime. Brienne was spared at the last moment to capture/manipulate Jaime.
**In the show, she's now sworn to House Stark and gets knighted by Jaime just before the Battle of Winterfell and then she and Jaime hook up afterwards, only for him to take off and break her heart, because remember kids, he'd rather fuck his sister than fuck an ugly chick. She is now Lady Commander of the Kingsguard as of the final episode.
* Lyanna Mormont: A badass ten-year-old girl who inherits [[Kislev|Bear Island]] after her mother and older sister die horribly in the Riverlands - at least if we are going by the show; in the book, her mother is still alive somewhere [[Catachan Jungle Fighters|waging a Guerilla War]] in the Neck and her older sister Alysanne is the de-facto head of House Mormont. Her activities include pimp-slapping bitches, leading men twice as old as her, and being completely loyal to the Starks despite all their misfortunes. [[Awesome|"Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North, whose name is STARK."]] She dies killing an undead giant at the Battle of Winterfell, which is pretty badass.
* Wyman Manderly, ''Lord Too-Fat-To-Sit-A-Horse'': The Lord of White Harbour and one of the few Northerners who worship the Seven. Fervently loyal to House Stark, he pays lip-service to the Iron Throne long enough for his eldest son to return home, all to mask a plan to restore the Starks to power, mostly by destabilising the Frey-Bolton alliance, building a navy, marshalling the forces of the lands east of the White Knife river, "losing" Freys in the wilderness and sending Lord Davos Seaworth to rescue Rickon Stark from Skagos. His favourite food is lamprey, although he has also developed a taste for Frey Pie. Also a remarkably graceful dancer, and can survive taking a knife to the throat.
** Wylla Manderly: Granddaughter to the above. Another badass little girl, her activities include openly declaring undying loyalty to House Stark and dying her hair green. She and Lyanna Mormont would probably be best friends if they met. [[Awesome|"The city is built upon the land [the Starks] gave us. In return, we swore that we should always be their men. Stark men!"]]
* Jon Umber, ''The Greatjon'': At first he seems to be your stereotypical, boisterous Northern Lord. However, he becomes one of Robb's most loyal supporters, being first to declare him as 'King in the North' after Ned's execution. Had his moment of awesome [[Awesome|when he killed and wounded four Freys at the Red Wedding, all the while being drunk and needing eight additional men to take him down.]]
* Beric Dondarrion, ''The Lightning Lord'': Minor lord who agreed to head an expedition to take out Gregor Clegane. This being Game of Thrones, however, his party is ambushed by the Mountain and is beaten rather badly, and he loses his life in the process. Thanks to his drunken Red Priest friend, however, he manages to come back not once, but eight times, and each time he comes back, he becomes more powerful, though at the cost of his memory. He now heads an outlaw faction of grimdark Robin Hood types called "The Brotherhood Without Banners", who are dedicated to punishing those who abuse and mistreat the smallfolk. Ironically, he's one of the few book characters to have died (permanently) in the books but remain alive in the show, except now he's dead for real as of the Battle of Winterfell.
* Thoros of Myr: Aforementioned drunken priest who is dedicated to R'hllor, though at first he doesn't really give a rat's ass about the Red God, as he prefers to party it up with wine and women, but after he 'accidentally' resurrects Beric, he becomes quite serious about his religion and vows to curb his excesses in drinking. Dies on a mission beyond the Wall to capture a wight (show-version). Bane of swordsmiths across the lands, as he likes to routinely ignite his swords with Wildfire when he gets a hold of some of the stuff, which completely destroys the blade.
* The Brave Companions: Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be a faction in this setting as fucked up as the Boltons, Freys, and Ironborn, these guys come along and prove you wrong. A bunch of "mercenaries" who are really more just complete and utter lunatics that are incapable of doing what they're paid to in any way except the bloodiest and nastiest, all with maximum [[Rape]] thrown in too (especially if Brienne of Tarth is involved, because every single fucking one of these guys wants, tries to, or threatens to rape her at some point). Led by Vargo Hoat, a goat-helmet wearing maniac who likes cutting body parts off of his victims before killing them. The rest of his band consists of a bunch of other sickos who are every bit as bad as him (except Rorge, who is even worse). To put this into perspective, the member of the group who is a pedophile priest (Septon Utt), is the ''least'' evil one, if only because he actually regrets what he does and is suggested to do what he does because of urges he can't control. The rest? Forget about it. After Vargo's gruesome death at the hands of the even worse Gregor Clegane, the surviving Brave Companions scatter, effectively dissolving the group but meaning a bunch of these assholes are still active. Cut from the TV show completely.
** Rorge: Gregor Clegane 2.0, being ''another'' big, brutish, psychotic monster who rapes people and murders children and who is a Chaotic Evil super-thug through and through (because apparently we needed another one in the setting), with the added bit of awfulness of being a child-hating pedophile. Along with Gregor Clegane, one of the absolute worst characters in the entire series (a high bar, as you've probably gathered by now). Killed by Brienne. In the TV show, he's a completely forgettable one-shot, throwaway character who gets killed by Arya before he can really do anything and doesn't come anywhere close to the awfulness of his book version.
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'''The Free Cities'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Nine city-states to the West of Essos, for the most part, the old colonies of the Valaryian Freehold. Mostly they are ruled by Merchant Princes. They look down on the Westerosi for being a bunch of up jumped backwards war-mongering morons who are only a few silverware sets and maesters away from absolute barbarism. In turn, the Westerosi look down on the Free Cities as being money-grubbing effete cowards ruled by cheesemongers who use bribery, tall walls and dirty tricks to get ahead in the world.

* Illyrio Mopatis: A rich fat bastard and a Magister of Pentos. Old buddies with Varys and a bigtime schemer.
* [[Officio Assassinorum|The Faceless Men]]: A cult of shape-shifting assassins who worship The Many-Faced God of death based in the free city of Braavos that give up personal identity. They claim descent from escaped Valyrian slaves who considered death to be a better fate than perpetual slavery. Their mission hence became being servants of the Many-Faced God of Death. You can hire them to off your rivals, but they request a steep and equivalent price. They also offer a painless, quick suicide for downtrodden and desparate people by the means of poison. Their motto is "Valar Morghulis": All Men Must Die.
* Xaro Xhoan Daxos: One of the thirteen leaders of the city of Qarth. A flamboyant, languid, bald rich man who looks after Daenerys while she stays in Qarth and gives her many gifts. He wants her dragons as much as anyone else and even tries to marry her despite his homosexual tendencies. He stops wanting the dragons later in the book series after seeing [[RIP AND TEAR|their work in Astapor]], and no longer wants her around as her anti-slavery stance is hampering his wealth, so he offers Daenerys ships to leave the area and declares war on her when she refuses. In the show, he's heterosexual, helps steal her dragons, fucks one of her handmaidens and gets locked in a vault for conspiring to have her killed. He's also black and fat in the show when he's white and lanky in the books, being Qartheen and all.
* Syrio Forel: The former First Sword of Braavos (aka the ruler's personal bodyguard) and later Arya's mentor in King's Landing. He teaches her the way of Braavosi fencing, called "Water Dancing", and sacrifices himself to save her from Lannister thugs, taking down at least six of them with a wooden sword. May have inadvertently set her on the path of becoming a badass assassin by telling her of his belief in the God of Death.

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'''The Dothraki'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Horse people who live in a country of endless grass plains referred to by others as the Dothraki sea. They only have one city, called Vaes Dothrak, which is less of a city and more of a place they all meet when important things have to be discussed. Have traits borrowed from several cultures, including Mongols and Native Americans, all filtered through European misconceptions of those cultures of course, such as the Dothraki's antipathy for heavy armour, despite the fact that the Mongols were very heavily armoured and also excelled as infantry, see the Battle of Leignitz. They fear the ocean because of its size and the fact that horses won't drink from it, calling it the "poison water".

* Khal Drogo: An Expy of <s>Genghis Khan</s> Yesukhei Baatyr (his son would have been the equivalent to Chinggis Khaan). Leads the largest Khalassar among the Dothraki. Despite being a barbarian warlord, Drogo is surprisingly intelligent and treats Daenerys well. After an assassin tries to kill her he promises to conquer Westeros for her and their unborn son and immediately starts raiding towns for slaves and ships. At one town he gets cut in a leadership challenge and Daenerys gets a captive wise woman to heal him. However, the woman hates him because his tribe destroyed her hometown, raped/slaughtered or enslaved her friends and raped her three times so she curses him to become catatonic (along with killing his unborn son), leading a devastated Daenerys to perform an arguable mercy kill by smothering him with a pillow. After she burns herself, her stillborn child and the wise woman on his funeral pyre, Daenerys survives and it brings her dragons to life. GRRM named Drogo after [[The Lord of the Rings|Frodo's father]].
* Daenerys' handmaidens.
** Doreah: Daenerys' handmaiden and a wedding gift from Illyrio. A woman from Lysene brought by her brother to teach her how to pleasure a man. In the book she dies of fever and starvation crossing a desert, in the TV show, she betrays Daenerys for [[Salamanders|Xaro's BBC]] and gets locked in a vault to starve to death.
** Irri: Daenerys' handmaiden who teaches Daenerys how to ride a horse. [[PROMOTIONS|Also pleasures Daenerys twice after catching her masturbating once]], yet this canonical girl-on-girl action was left out of the show. The character was even killed off there when she survived in the books, but in this case, it was because her actress' visa had expired rather than [[C.S. Goto|author railroading]].
** Jhiqui: Daenerys' handmaiden who teaches her the Dothraki language and squabbles with Irri over wanting one of Daenerys' bodyguards when he becomes a badass. Also dies in the TV show while staying alive so far in the books.

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'''Slavers Bay'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">A civilization of [[Stupid Evil]] slavers. The remains of a previous civilization that was once the big powerful empire thanks to having phalanxes of obedient, pain-resistant soldiers which Valyria conquered a long while ago because phalanxes don't do too well against motherfucking dragons. They are ruled by wealthy slave mongers who buy slaves, train them up to do specific things and generally are a bunch of stuck up, decadent, puppy-eating (literally) assholes. Basically a civilization so repugnant even most hippies will be cheering when Dany decides to conquer them.

* The Unsullied: Eunuch phalanx fighting slave soldiers trained the Spartan way to produce totally obedient infantry that never break ranks. They also don't feel pain due to drinking a special drink daily, and each one has to take a new name from the name box each day so they can't develop a sense of identity. At least until Dany "bought" the lot of them, had them sack the city which trained them, and freed them.
* Grey Worm: The Unsullied Commander and a no-nonsense badass. When given a chance to take a new name he keeps his slave name because it's the name he had when freed so he considers it lucky. He is completely loyal to Daenerys, considering her his saviour, and in the show, he falls in love with fellow freed-woman, Missandei. This being ASOIAF, however, he can only watch helplessly as his lover is beheaded in front of him by the Mountain. This drives him into a rage, and he eagerly takes part in the sacking of King's Landing in revenge for her death. After the war is over and both Daenerys and Cersei are dead, he takes the Unsullied forces to Naath, in order to fulfil his promise to Missandei that he'd protect her homeland.
* Strong Belwas: A fat but skilled eunuch gladiator. Loves liver and onions and referring to himself in the third person. Travelling companion/guide of Ser Barristan. Has an awesome scene where he beats the champion of Meereen then mocks the Meereenese by taking a shit in their direction and wiping his ass on their dead champion's cloak. Also saves Daenerys from eating poisoned sweets. [[FAIL|Left out of the show]].
* Daario Naharis: A Tyroshi mercenary captain who dyes his hair blue. Betrays his fellow commanders for Daenerys because he loves her as a queen. Fortunately for him, Daenerys loves him back and they pursue a romance for a time, though she doesn't marry him as she's still otherwise smart enough to know she has to save herself for a political marriage. Goes to Yunkai as a hostage in the war on Meereen. Also potentially a shapeshifter, if the show is to be believed.
*Missandei: A young female slave with a remarkable talent for linguistics and one of the more empathetic people in this dark world, Missandei is freed by Daenerys during her campaign to liberate Slaver's Bay, eventually becoming one of her closest confidants and advisers. While a child in the books, in the show Missandei is a grown woman, falls in love with the Unsullied leader Grey Worm, but later is captured by Cersei and beheaded by the zombified Mountain in front of all her friends, but not before telling her friends to burn the Lannisters to ashes.

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'''Maesters'''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> More than Scribes, (much) less than Mentats, Maesters serve their highborn lords as intellectual muscle. Maesters serve as doctors, teachers, and scientists, and are educated at The Citadel in Oldtown. They are expected to master a variety of topics, with each topic/level of mastery grants you a chain-link forged in a different type of metal (black iron for ravenry, valyrian steel for magic), and once you hit fifteen links, you can become an ordained Maester. Because of the high costs of their education (and the fact that you need to know how to read), Maesters are often highborn, probably a non-inheriting son or bastard. It is semi-prestigious, with the nerds calling themselves "Knights of the Mind" with all seriousness (and probably with some snickering jocks in the background) but you also don't get much say where you'll be assigned (and if the castle changes hands, you go with it, but it's not unheard of for Maesters to get killed along with everyone else.

A fan theory credits the death of Dragons with the work of Maesters, because the Maesters, as men of medieval "science," have a vested interest in the decline of magic, even though they also offer a <s>bachelor's degree</s> maester's link in "higher mysteries" which they consider to be their equivalent of an english major.
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===Magic and Gods===
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> The world of ASOIAF has various religions and faiths abound, just like in real life. Similarly, they range between fucking awesome to utterly useless. Dissimilarly, some of them have very tangible, undeniable magic powers, although it is said that the magic became stronger after the rebirth of Dragons into the world, and that in the Far East, where people worship [[Lovecraft|Lovecraft references]], that magic is still alive and well, but those are all just rumors.

Blood Magic seems to be the most consistent, with practitioners paying steep prices for magic, while the druidic magic of the Children of the Forest and the Old Gods still hold strong to this day, they just don't have any practitioners left.

Magic and the Afterlife is a theme in the setting as well, most expounded by the faithful of R'hllor: fire is associated with the warmth of life, as well as light; on the other hand, death is associated with cold and darkness; death carries a harsh finality in the series, ''except when it doesn't:'' as they've shown in special cases with those resurrected by R'hllor, rebirth comes with a price, and not everyone comes back ''fully there''.

*[[Ecclesiarchy|The Faith of the Seven]]: The Catholic Church/Church of England stand-in mixed with elements of Hinduism, which gets both sympathetic and unsympathetic characters associated with it (though mostly only in the books for the former). Holds an anti-slavery stance. The god/s are considered seven aspects of one deity with three male aspects (The Smith, the Father, the Warrior), three female aspects (The Maiden, the Mother, the Crone) and a sexless one representing Death, a bit akin to how the Hindu God Vishnu has multiple aspects. The places of worship are called Septs, and their system includes Septons, nun-equivalents called Septas and a Pope equivalent called a High Septon. The High Septons all give up their names when they become one to confuse future historians (and readers).
** High Septon 1 Fatfuck: A fat, greedy man who used the position for personal gain. He ended up being [[Grimdark|torn apart in a riot]], because the people resented that he had enough food to stay fat while they were starving.
** High Septon 2 Lannister Puppet: Successor of High Septon Fatfuck. Chosen by Tyrion so the Faith would be loyal to the Lannisters. Only ''slightly'' corrupt, being a pro-Lannister yes-man. Murdered on Cersei's order in the book, while in the show he's retconned into a whoremonger who gets deposed by the Sparrows (see below).
** High Septon 3/The High Sparrow: Successor of High Septon Lannister Puppet. After the second High Septon shown in the present day of the story died, the smallfolk burst into the meeting to pick a successor and ordered their chosen candidate to be put in charge when his original successor was caught whoremongering. He'd been a wandering preacher beforehand, and his feet were dark and gnarled from lots of walking. When he reaches the position he starts [[gets shit done|getting things done]]. Since he was appointed by a smallfolk religious movement called Sparrows, he's given the moniker "The High Sparrow". The nobility underestimates him, either due to having other matters or disregard for religious people, but he turns out to be smart, well-meaning and somewhat ruthless. Under the High Sparrow, he and the other clergymen sell their fancy clothes and decorations [[Noblebright|replacing them with simple wool tunics, using the money to buy food and clothes for the poor in King's Landing]]. He also has their Knights-Templar-equivalent reformed to [[Inquisition|protect the faithful and help them root out]] [[heresy]] and sin. He also outwits Cersei and has her arrested and tried for all her evil deeds. While Cersei's scheming does lead to Margaery's arrest, Cersei confesses to some crimes while concealing others, leading to Cersei taking a nude walk of penance in front of the entire city. After this, he somewhat reined in the nobles' politicking to actually look after the commoners and the Faith, though this does make some enemies. In the show, while he still talks of helping the Smallfolk, he and the Sparrows are [[C.S Goto|flanderized]] from assorted smallfolk and clergymen tired of the nobles' lawlessness and power plays into one-dimensional stereotypes and thinly-veiled jabs at the Catholic Church [[Imperial Truth|in a shoe-horned anti-religion message]]. While they do arrest Cersei and Margaery like in the books, the High Sparrow's plans all come to nothing, as during the trial most of the Faith, including the High Sparrow himself, get blown to Kingdom Come when Cersei has her agents ignite a massive amount of magical napalm underneath the Great Sept. In the books they're much more like Martin Luther and the Lutherans, except that the Protestant Reformation wins outright.
* [[Old Ones|Old Gods]]: Native American/Japanese Kame/Druid/nature spirits that reside in places called Godswoods. The original practitioners of this faith were the Children of the Forest, non-elf looking Wood Elves, whose magics were responsible for smashing an entire Southern Warhost with tsunamis (leaving only a narrow isthmus between the North and everyone else), the Wall (it was a collaborative effort with humans), and allowing people to look into the past, and (confirmed in the show at least) influence it.
**Their powers are limited to the North, though, where the last remaining Godswoods remain, but they can grant gifted individuals awesome psychic powers like Warging (mind-controlling animals) and Greensight (Time Travel). For some reason, Martin claims they're based off the Norse Gods. Probably has to do with the way the Vikings made sacrifices to their gods, by hanging them in Ash trees, a symbol for the World Tree Yggdrasil. The Weirwood trees are sacred to the followers of the Old Gods in a similar way. Mostly worship of them is quiet and informal.
*R'hllor: The God of Fire and Light, and like the Old Gods, actually shows evidence for existing. [[/tg/ gets shit done|He gets shit done]], being one of the most common faiths East of Westeros, and his priests have powers such as fire magic and motherfucking Resurrection. Has a nasty habit for burning heretics, though. GRRM said this faith is roughly based (read: poorly modelled after) upon Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism. His nemesis is The Great Other: the god of cold and darkness, the leader of the Others, and prophesied to be defeated by the chosen one, or messianic figure: [[Star Child|Azor Ahai/The Prince That Was Promised]], a figure who is the prophesied warrior that will fight with the Great Other/Night's King during the Apocalypse. Interestingly enough, the prophecy may not refer to a single person, but three (Jon, Tyrion/Bran, and Daenerys). Supposedly, one of these three will also receive an [[Emperor's Sword|awesome flaming sword called "Lightbringer"]].
**R'hllor is very popular among the slaves and poor of the East, though Eastern nobles hate him because of that association. It's actually hard-to-tell how many "miracles" ascribed to him are actually real miracles. Stannis, absolute chad though he is, has a sword called "Lightbringer" meant to evoke the mythical one, but Aemon has [[Bullshit|noticed that it doesn't give off any heat]].
**For obvious reasons, they are ''very excited'' that there are Dragons again.
* Him of Many Faces: The god of the Dead of the religion whose followers are the [[Officio Assassinorum|Faceless Men]]. According to his cult of assassins, whom Arya joins, all gods of death are just him: since every religion has a god of death of some sort, he ''must'' be the only one that's real. Of course, your mileage may vary as to whether he's real or not, though his most awesome followers are granted shapeshifting abilities and powers to be the ultimate assassins.
* Drowned God: Cthulhu combined with Odin. Runs an underwater Valhalla were all Ironborn go whey they either if they drowned at sea, the men die a manly death or the women die in childbirth. Probably doesn't exist or he would have done something about Euron Greyjoy... at least in the books. There, Euron is [[Imperial Truth|proudly scornful]] of him, and his brother Aeron fruitlessly and endlessly mutters "no godless man can sit the Seastone Chair". In the show, Euron is perfectly happy to go through the traditional Drownie coronation ritual and Aeron performs it.
* The Night's King: This is completely different depending on whether you prefer the [[oldfag|books]] or [[newfag|show]]. Book version: A long time ago, when the Night's Watch was just barely getting set up, its Lord Commander, the thirteenth in line, decided to climb over the Wall and explore some. While in the woods to the north of the Wall, he found a beautiful [[Monstergirls|Other female]]. He fell in love with her, had [[/d/|sex with her on top of the Wall]], which somehow changed him into an albino version of [[Star Wars|Darth Maul]], and set himself up as King of the Wall, making everyone in the Watch his slaves and sacrificial fodder. Naturally, this didn't sit too well with the Starks and the Wildlings, and so they banded together to free the Watch and kick his ass, which they managed to do successfully. Now everyone thinks him as dead or a myth. Show version: he was the very first White Walker ever created by the Children, and he decided to get back at them by wiping out all life. Also, whilst he was apparently beaten in the ancient past and sealed away behind the Wall, he's still "alive" and well, [[Daemonculaba|turning infant human boys into new White Walkers]]. Also, he can apparently raise up entire legions of undead, just by raising his arms and looking completely smug about it; unlike regular Others, who can just raise up maybe a village at most. Given that he's the resident [[BBEG|Dark Lord]] of the series, it makes sense that he can take down a dragon with seemingly little effort (a simple throw of his spear), and resurrect it to be his personal steed a la Arthas. (Whether that particular nonsense is going to show up in the books is up in the air, it's suitably grimdark and not particularly [[derp]] so it might.) Then he used the dragon to blow a hole in the Wall and begin [[The End Times]] for Westeros. But [[FAIL|dead]], thanks to Arya's magic ninja haxx which let her [[what|kill the BBEG and his entire race and army of zombies ''in one blow.'']]
** The Others/The White Walkers: A mysterious race from beyond the Wall, known to [[newfag|HBO fans]] as "the White Walkers". Can be described as ice demons/snow elves with necromancy. Eight thousand years ago, they invaded Westeros during a decades-long winter (even longer than the usual years-long winters) known as "the Long Night". With an army of undead warriors, they proceeded to fuck Westeros up every which way to [[Sunday]] before the locals finally drove them out, established the Night's Watch, and built the Wall to keep them out. Like all fantasy aspects of ASOIAF, they are very cliched.
**In the TV series, it's revealed that they were created from human captives by "The Children", the pseudo-[[Elf]] fair folk race that lived in Westeros before humanity arrived, as an attempt to create a super-weapon. The idea was since humanity bred faster than the Children could keep up with, they would create icy [[lich]]-creatures that could create [[undead]] soldiers, and these would then wipe out all human life. Instead, it went disastrously wrong because it turned out that the Children actually couldn't control what they'd created, so the Others [[Ork|just want to exterminate '''all''' life.]] In both versions the Night's King is in control.
*'''Other Eastern Magic/Religions''' - The further and further east you go, the more GRRM scatters Lovecraft references to give the world flavour, like the Shadowlands and its cities of oily, black stone, Leng, and [[Deep Ones|fish people]]. They're just references, though, and will likely never be important.
**The Unsullied have their own goddess, the Lady of Spears, [[Slaanesh|whose altar they burn their dicks on as offerings]].
**The slavers worship a harpy goddess and justify their slavery through her.
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==Locations==

'''Westeros''': The continent where about 80% of the plot takes place. Scotland in the North, Siberia/Northern Scandinavia beyond the wall, Moorish Spain in the South, with the rest being England as far as climate is concerned, only much, much larger.
*The North: By far the largest of the Seven Kingdoms in size, and the least in population. [[Naggaroth|A rocky, cold and dangerous landscape where life barely tolerable]] ([[Norsca|although it's still preferrable to the eldrich lands beyond the wall]]), sometimes it even snows in summer, giving you a general idea why it's quite a shitty place to be in when compared with the more southern kingdoms. Living in it are the Northmen, culturally an inbetween of Northern English and Scots. Most of them still revere the Old Gods and practice traditions that feel very alien to those living in the south, of the First Men culture before the Andal Invasion, still holding out here and the Iron Islands. It's also damn near unconquerable by conventional means due to the narrow isthmus between it and the south being a noxious swamp; . Its ruling house at the beginning of the Story is House Stark, later House Bolton; Its capital is Winterfell.
*Iron Islands: Large, rocky archipelago off the coast of the North and the Riverlands. Their bleak and inhospitable landscape is the major reason why the Ironmen culture, the other hold out of the First Men culture in Westeros which has the unique blend of only political and not cultural Andal influence and lack of Children of the Forest influence as Weirwoods don't grow on islands and only First Men humans ever lived here during those times, is so centered around pillaging and raiding; you can't grow crops on rock. Does have a decently sized economy based around metal working, but nowhere near enough to support its populace. Their capital is Pyke.
*Riverlands: As the name says, the Riverlands are marked by several large rivers flowing through it and the large fertile valleys surrounding them. The historical whipping boy of the continent after the Andal Invasion took over the old First Men realms (minus the North and the Iron Islands), constantly fought over by the Westerlands, the Stormlands, the Reach, the Iron Islands and the Vale, to the point that it was under Iron Islands rule when Aegon Targaryen unified the continent minus Dorne. Gets buttfucked the hardest during the War of the Five Kings by a metric ton; first by the Mountain carrying out a campaign of terror against the civilian populace on Tywin's orders and second by most of the major fights between the Lannisters and the Starks taking place there. Honestly, after all the fighting, raping and pillaging happening in the Riverlands, one must wonder how many people are actually still left in them. Their ruling house is House Tully (later House Baelish); its Capital is Riverrun (later Harrenhal).
*Vale of Arryn: Mountainous Region east of the Riverlands home to (supposedly) the finest knights in Westeros due to them having constant field practice in crushing rebellion after rebellion of the native <s>Irish</s> Mountain Tribes (think Forsworn from Skyrim, only a lot more foul-mouthed) and having an absolute abundance of tiny territories to give out. The population lives more densely packed in the few large cities and townships that exist here due and traversing them is dangerous. Its ruling house is House Arryn, its capital The Eyrie, '''the''' hardest castle to take in Westeros as it is built on a mountaintop. Gulltown, one of the cities of Westeros, is the main economic hub.
*Westerlands: The second-smallest Kingdom in size but by far the richest due to its abundance of Gold and Silver Mines. Has a proud tradition of fucking everyone over by the means of money, politics or both combined. Also has a substantial importance as a major trading and naval hub in the city of Lannisport, which is the largest port on the western side of the continent. Its ruling house is House Lannister, its capital Casterly Rock. Casterly Rock was the capital of the old Kings, House Casterly, which was outsmarted by [[Lukas the Trickster|Lann the Clever]], who married the last surviving daughter and founded House Lannister.
*Crownlands: The lands directly controlled by the Iron Throne, surrounding a big bay, with a rather pleasant, mild climate. Centered around the capital King's Landing, which gets an entry of its own. Its ruling house is always the house of the current kings. Formerly divided between the Riverlands and the Stormlands.
**King's Landing: The capital of the seven kingdoms and by far its largest city. It houses every important institution on the continent, most importantly the Red Keep, where the King of the Seven Kingdoms resides and the Great Sept of Baelor, the religious center of the Faith of the Seven. Aside from the Red Keep and the Great Sept, a filth ridden, downtrodden shithole that is rife with poverty and criminals whereever you may set foot; the City Guard is openly corrupt and acts more like a government-approved gang of thugs. It seems to be something of an unofficial sport among all chacters in the books to never say anything good the city. Architecturally described like Medieval London, at the size of 1600s Paris.
**Dragonstone: An old Valyrian outpost located on a small, rocky island some miles off the coast of King's Landing. Used to be the actual seat of House Targaryen, even though they had resided in King's Landing ever since Aegon conquered the Seven Kingdoms. Castle Dragonstone was clearly of Valyrian design, as its architecture and design felt foreign and ancient to the Westerosi who resided here. Also notable for sitting on a huge deposit of Obsidian. After the Targaryens were driven from Westeros, Robert gave Dragonstone to Stannis, who never made peace with the fact that Robert effectively robbed him of his rightful title as heir to Storm's End.
*The Reach: The second-largest of the Seven Kingdoms, and the most populous. Its wide plains, dominated by fields and plantings serve as the breadbasket of the Seven Kingdoms. Also home to the oldest city in Westeros, Oldtown, which in turn is home to the Citadel of the Maesters. Its ruling house is Tyrell, its capital Highgarden. House Tyrell is matrilineally descended from Garth Greenhand like many other houses. The old ruling family, House Gardener, Garth's direct descendants, was wiped out when Aegon unleashed his dragons, with the then Lord of House Tyrell (at this point permanent stewards to House Gardener), was placed in control as he was married to the last Gardener female.
**The Citadel: The Citadel is the seat of the order of Maesters and said to be the tallest standing structure in Westeros apart from The Wall, which can be seen from its tip when the weather is right. As the seat of the Maesters, it fulfills multiple roles in the society of the Seven Kingdoms, it their central archive and library, where most, if not nearly all knowledge in the world is collected and stored, a university, where new Maesters are trained and a large hospital, although its relatively remote location means that only the truly desperate actually travel in person here.
*Stormlands: The lands of House Baratheon, a mix of forested mountains and steep, stony shores: so-named for the very frequent storms that batter its coast. The weather here is so bad, their capital is known as Storm's End because all previous castles were destroyed by the weather, so this one had to be built <s>by a competent Northman architect</s> with magic. In spite of the dangerously bad weather, the area can be quite beautiful when not being battered by the elements. The Baratheons are descended from a loyal general who served the original Aegon, who was also rumored to be his half-brother. After Robert ascended the throne, control of the Stormlands was left to his youngest brother, Renly, while the middle-brother, Stannis, was assigned to guard Robert's back on the much-smaller, less prestigious island of Dragonestone.
*Dorne: The southernmost region of Westeros and the hottest (in more ways than just temperature), consists of rocky deserts in its center and lush, meditterrean areas on its coasts. The Dornish people differ a lot from other Westerosi in ethnicity and culture and have a different origin, that of the migrating Rhoynar people interbreeding with the then relatively isolated local Westerosi. [[Dune|Dorne was also the only Kingdom to successfully resist conquest by the Targaryens]] and was only brought into the fold through political marriages, and their rulers retain the title of Prince (the Rhoynar and the local Westerosi don't use king or queen, they use prince or princess), not afforded to anyone else not of the Royal Family. Its ruling house is Martell, its capital Sunspear.
*The Wall: A wall of ice of gargantuan proportions erected by the First Men to protect themselves against the Others/White Walkers long ago that marks the nothern border of Westeros proper and runs across it from west to east for three hundred miles. In the times when the Night's Watch was under full strength, it was an impenetrable fortification against anything that might dare to cross it, not just because of its sheer dimensions, but also the implication that the wall itself is reinforced by eldrich magic keeping the horrors beyond the wall at bay via unnatural means. Nowadays only three of its 19 keeps are permanently manned, leaving wide gaps in the Night's Watch defense against Wildlings, who sometimes climb over it to raid the South. The Night King tears a hole into it with one of Daenerys' Dragons in the final episode of season 7, allowing him and his undead army to pass through.
*Beyond-the-Wall:
**Craster's Keep: Not really a "keep" but the [[GRIMDARK|home of a man who fucks his own daughters and offers his sons to the Others]]. He is one of the very few "independent" wildlings and offers use of his home to the Night's Watch when they go off on scouting expeditions. Because it's full of servile (inbred) women, the men of the Night's Watch mutiny and take it over.
**Thenn: The name of both the land and its people, the Thenn consider themselves to be the ''true'' "last of the First Men," because they have laws and lords compared to the anarchist free-for-all of the other Free Folk; they don't speak common, they can actually smith, and they treat the "Magnar," the title of their king, like a god. In the show, they're just shown to be a bunch of scarred barbarians.
**Lands of Always Winter: The furthest north people have ever gone and have been able to come back from, the Lands are perpetually frozen, and the Others are said to come from here. Clearly, if you head far enough North, you'll hit a Chaos Rift and end up in the Warp.

'''The Stepstones''': Formerly a solid land bridge between Westeros and Essos, it was brought down by Children of the Forest magic in a failed attempt to stop the First Men invasion. Now an archipelago of islands infested by various ne'er-do-wells.

'''Essos''': A huge landmess (no, not a typo) about southeast of Westeros and home to many independent city-states west of the big mountain range. Generally agreed upon to be largely desolate wilderness sprinkled in with the occasional kingdoms that seem exotic and alien to Westerosi. Most of its western half used to be the center of power of the legendary Valyrian Freehold, with the Free Cities being colonies of them that survived the downfall of the Valyrian Empire hundreds of years ago. The exceptions are Slaver's Bay, conquered by the Valyrians before regaining independence after the Freehold's collapse, Qarth, Ib and some of the others.
*Old Valyria: The former center of the [[Roman Empire|all-powerful free state that ruled over most of Essos at its peak and posessed magic and technology, as well as dragons to keep control over it.]] Valyrias strength was legendary, so much so in fact that the downfall of it still influences politics in the world centuries after it occured. No one quite knows why Valyria fell, the only certain thing is that it was plagued by a sudden series of natural disasters that all but destroyed its homelands and left it in ruin. Valyrian culture only survived in bastardized forms in the Free Cities and, prior to their extinction, House Targaryen in Westeros. The ruins of Valyria are said to cursed and avoided by all but the most desperate of travelers. Traveling through Valyria is similar to sailing through the [[Eye of Terror]]: not only are you dealing with dangerous seas (''boiling seas'' akin to underwater tectonic activity), but also fucking [[daemons]], and [[Gellerpox Infected|parasitic plagues]].
*Free Cities: There are 9 city-states on the Western Half of Essos. 8 are former Valyrian colonies, with Braavos being the notable exception to most of the things they have in common. What ties them all together is that they're all connected by trade and feudalism isn't such a big thing here, which also makes their culture remarkably different from the Westerosi. Westerosi tend to view them as greedy opportunists while the Free Cities in turn view Westerosi as ignorant morons at best and backwards savages at worst. If you were going to have a setting based on ASOIAF and didn't want to spend the entire time shitting in the dirt or bleeding out in a ditch for some inbred noble, this is where you'd want to be:
**Braavos: The only one of the nine free cities to not be a Valyrian Colony (excepting the other countries like Qarth and Ib, who don't count among the nine). It was founded by Slaves that escaped their overlord in a marsh on the northernmost tip of Essos. It is mainly known for its massive port and the Iron Bank of Braavos, the biggest bank in the world. It also houses the House of Black and White, the central temple and headquarters of the Faceless Men.
**Pentos: Another large trading port on the western edge of Essos. It serves as the major trading hub between Westeros and the rest of Essos.
**Lys: Located on an island off the coast of Essos. Founded as a resort for Freeholders, it has the largest population with the Valyrian phenotype in the known world. A decadent city whose most famous export are prostitutes.
**Myr: The women here are hot, considering how often Westerosi seem to come back with wives from here. Other than that, its only notable feature is its forever-war with Lys and Tyrosh.
**Norvos: They make really good bodyguards that are taught to see their [[Executioners|axes as their waifus]].
**Qohor: Not much is known about them, except one of the brutal mercenary companies is from here, and they worship the [[Lovecraft|Black Goat.]]
**Tyrosh: Greedy slavers. Not really notable, except they're one-third of the constant warfare of the Disputed Lands along with Lys and Myr and for being extremely flamboyant.
**Volantis: The crown jewel, first colony of the Freehold and considers itself the successor state to the Freehold.
**Lorath: No, they don't speak for the trees. Lorath is the poorest of the Free Cities, and not much is known about them. Its most notable feature are the underground labyrinths that dot the island and which predate the Valyrians. Typical of Martin, the Labyrinths and a similar cult in Essos (the cult of the Pattern) are a reference to someone else's work, [[Dick|but no, he doesn't like fanfiction]].
*Ghiscari Empire and Slavers Bay: To the East of Valyria and the Free Cities, these cities pre-date Valyria. Before they were conquered, they had their own empire and worshiped the Harpy. Nowadays, they trade with the Dothraki, exchanging tribute for slaves, which they then market to the rest of the World. Vaguely the [[Middle East]] of ASOIAF. They are: Old Ghis, New Ghis, Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen. In the books, Dany is stuck here trying to manage the clusterfuck that is deslaverizing these lands. Currently locked in a brutal war where the newly-freed slaves are either fighting the surviving slaver-nobles, other cities, or each other.
*Qarth: What separates the "East" from the "Far East." It's to the East of Slaver's Bay and West of not!China/Japan, so any traffic between the Free Cities, Slaver's bay, and them, requires them to pass through Qarth. Home to a bunch of fucking weirdo Orientalist tropes that vie for power: The Pureborn, the noble descendants of ancient Qaathi Kings and Queens that fled the sacking of their cities to Qarth, so hold no real power beyond their titles; the Ancient Guild of Spicers (it's in the name); the Thirteen, ''another'' group of Merchants; the Tourmaline Brotherhood (more merchants!). Qarth is also the location of the House of the Undying, a group of Warlocks that drink "shade-of-the-evening," which is pretty much [[Dune|Spice from Dune]], but made from trees and not wormshit; the House of the Undying and most of its Warlocks were burnt down by Dany's dragons after they tried to steal them; they sent out some guys for revenge, but they ran into Euron where he promptly murdered them all and took their <s>spice</s> <s>nightshade</s> shade-of-the-evening. Functionally Singapore, but with a more Indo-Persian aesthetic.
*Rhoyne: Destroyed former city of the Rhoynar, who fled the Valyrian Freehold and migrated to Dorne. The former capital is currently infested by Stone-Men, Greyscale survivors who have gone feral.
*Ib: not!Dwarfs, but described more like Neanderthals than Nordic shorties. They're [[squat]], barrel-chested, with thick wiry black hair, heavy sloping eye brows and square-teeth of neanderthals, They're also incredibly hairy, and even their women have facial hair., Instead of digging holes in mountains, they travel the sees in equally-stocky whaling ships. They tend to keep to themselves, [[Meme|but are natural sailors, suitable for long voyages]].
*The Dothraki Sea: Not a sea, but the name for the not!Eurasian Plains. Before the Freehold collapsed and the Dothraki tribesmen took advantage of the chaos of the Century of Blood to conquer it and burn down all but one of the old Qaathi cities (with only Qarth itself surviving) and most of the old Kingdom of Sarnor along with other minor cities, it was known as the Great Grass Sea.
**Vaes Dothrak: The capital and only permanent Dothraki settlement. It is forbidden to carry weapons or spill blood here (doesn't mean you can't kill through other means).
*Golden Empire of Yi Ti: Not!China, with a mysterious history and pattern of legends eerily-similar to Westeros' own. Like China, has a long history of Emperors, each dynasty progressively ruling over smaller, weaker empires. The current dynasty is actually so weak, they're not taken seriously outside their capital.
**The Five Forts: In the not!Chinese version of the Long Winter/Long Night, the Empire of Yi Ti was cast into a long night that never ended, where the evil Lion of the Night was unleashed by the Bloodstone Emperor. He was beat back by the Lord of Light/Hyrkoon the Hero/but the name that the Yi Ti know him by was never stated. Just like the Wall in Westeros, the Five Forts were said to be erected by a great Emperor soon after to make sure the crisis never happens again. Just like Westeros, the Five Forts have waned in importance, now only protecting the Yi Ti from barbarians. The Five Forts are said to be made from a material of "fused black stone," similar in description to many ancient ruins all over the setting. Harrenhal is also described similarly, but Harrenhal was stone melted by dragonfire, so the idea that the Five Forts was made with the aid of dragons and/or magic has been floated by fans.
*The Jogos Nhai: not!Mongols, but they ride Zebras and are literally cone-heads.
*Asshai-by-the-Shadow: Further-Further-East, it may as well be mythic. The city of Asshai is depressingly gloomy, the entire city is composed of dark black towers made of fused, black stone that seems to "drink the light."

The South:
'''Summer Isles''': Think Avelorn, but Black. An archipelago to the Far South of Westeros, everything here is pretty idyllic. War is very formalized, prostitution is a religious rite, it's practically paradise. A deposed prince was sent to exile in Westeros and had been trying to get Robert to make the journey south to put him back on the throne, but no one really took him seriously.

'''Sothoryos''': [[Lustria|Jungle hell]].
*Yeen: Made of the same creepy black metal in Stygai, implied to be an old Empire of the Dawn Outpost. Even the death world jungle (as in, not just the animals, the actual jungle itself) refuses to go in there for fear of dying.

'''Ulthos''': not!Australia, and has absolutely no lore. Seriously, GRRM has literally never mentioned it except in relation to another place that also has no lore. It's a passing mention that his obsessive fans took note of, and when they literally helped wrote the setting book for him, their guess became canon.

==The appeal of A Song of Ice And Fire==
Exactly what catches the eyes of [[Skub|a given fan/critic/lout who complains about how bad it is anytime the show is mentioned within earshot]] to ASOIAF and its TV adaptation varies from individual to individual. Still, there's a couple of major draws.

'''The Worldbuilding:''' The main reason why this series gets compared to [[The Lord of the Rings]], ASOIAF is literally ''drowning'' under the weight of its worldbuilding, being crammed as full of facts about fictitious regions, histories, cultures, dynasties and races as GRRM can fit it. Your mileage will vary on how ''good'' that info is, but there's plenty of info in it. It is worth noting that much of the vagueness of various aspects of the world's lore comes down to the limited perspectives of each of the characters' point of view, so many places and events are often only known partially through superstition, rumors, and often second hand experiences passed down and muddled over time; all of which play quite heavily into the overall story structure of the series.

'''A vast colorful Cast:''' A lot of works of fantasy get by with a few archetypal characters (the Young Guy out to Prove themself, the Wise Wizard, the Dark Lord, the Mischievous One, the Grizzled Veteran, the Princess, the Dwarf, etc) and maybe a guy or two which rises above this. A Song of Ice and Fire has dozens of viewpoint characters and a hundreds of secondaries each with different situations, drives, motives and quirks that make them reasonably interesting. Even if you don't like one or some of them, there are plenty of others. When they die, it often hits home. Speaking of which...

'''Mainstream [[Dark Fantasy]]:''' Dark Fantasy is not exactly a mainstream niche. ASOIAF stands out by deliberately trying to market itself to the mainstream, despite embracing an abundance of dark fantasy tropes; gratuitous violence, sexuality and sexual violence, moral ambiguity, political intrigue, and a willingness to suddenly kill off any character, even the most likeable or heroic of them.

'''[[Low Fantasy]]:''' On the surface, ASOIAF is an old-school Low Fantasy setting, being a medieval-tech world with the story openly focused on the mundane lives of people struggling for political power and though supernatural elements do exist, they tend to be used sparingly.

'''[[High Fantasy]]:''' But if you scratch the surface, ASOIAF is also a High Fantasy setting, which is always the more marketable of the two, with the big backstory about how the world is facing impending doom from an army of wintery [[fey]] and their [[undead]] minions. There are also non-evil higher powers working against them, but they get swept under the rug in the show. Also, [[dragon]]s. As the more marketable genre, it's also inevitably the more skubby one, for whatever that's worth.

'''[[Magical Realm|Gratuitous Sexuality]]:''' More a thing for the TV show than the books; GRRM's scenes were [[Rape|raepy]] in the earlier volumes, and apparently our boy must have overheard the nickname "George Rape Rape Martin (I ''Like'' Rape)", because he dialed back the forced boning in #4-5. The frequent scenes of nudity and sex in the early seasons of the show were a ''big'' selling point for many people (the casting of people from the sex industry for some of these scenes also helped).

'''Not much in terms of generic fantasy tropes:''' Hate how almost every fantasy just has to have things popularized by Tolkien such as elves, dwarves, orcs and all that stuff? You're in luck because ASOIAF doesn't have a "five races" system, their accompanying stereotypes or the plot hinging on a magic item. On the other hand, it does have several generic fantasy tropes, such as [[dragon]]s, [[Medieval Stasis]], [[undead]] and at least two contenders for [[BBEG|Dark Lord]] status, so if you hate them too, well...

'''Lots of Houses and Sigils''': OK, so this is sort of a joke...except not completely. For those who are artistically minded and love coming up with their own OC groups and/or fleshing out minor characters, this setting really does invite it with the absolutely insane number of houses [[Space Marines|that each have their own distinct logo/color-scheme combo]].

==Oh Yeah, About The TV Show==
[[image:KnightsWhoSayFuck.jpg|150px|thumb|left|Yeah, pretty much.]]

{{Skubby}}

After the first three books became hits, many Hollywood producers and directors had come to the sadistic neckbeard, asking him about making a movie adaptation. At first, he was reluctant at best, due to the fact that a lot of his content would've been cut out to fit into a movie trilogy (see the Lord of the Rings live-action films). Then, a couple of dudes, David Benioff and D.B/Daniel Brett Weiss (AKA D&D, or more accurately as of the final season, Dumb & Dumber), decided to contact him and asked him at a local restaurant about turning ASOIAF into a Television show produced by HBO, the top-rated soft-core porno channel. The story goes that George asked them a very specific question (Who is Jon Snow's mother?). Satisfied with the response they gave, he gave them permission to start work on the show, which would be titled after the first book, ''Game of Thrones''. They would later go on to prove that this is not a good way of choosing who should adapt your work.

The television show casts several well-known performers, such as Sean Bean as Eddard, Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, Lena Headey as Cersei, and Charles Dance as Tywin. They have also cast some comparatively less well-known actors and even ones new to cinema, such as Sophie Turner (Sansa), Maisie Williams (Arya), Kit Harington (Jon), Iwan Rheon (Ramsay), Alfie Allen (Theon), and Richard Madden (Robb)

Thus, book snobs seem to think that every episode post-season 4 is nothing more than Emmy-bait. Regardless of the fact Kit Harington still [[Fail|doesn't have an Emmy]], there's a valid contention in that regard, with the number of liberties taken overshadowing the initial appeal.

The final season (more on that below) was eventually revealed to be such a train wreck because Dumb & Dumber did not want to work on the series anymore and had let the success with the earlier seasons go to their heads. In their arrogance, instead of handing the reins to someone else, they decided to plan out their own ending and use it as an audition to Disney so they could write for Star Wars. By then, they'd run out of books to adapt, there was no superior writing for them to leech off of and there was no one to gainsay them in their echo chamber of a writer's room (even George himself was cut out). The result was absolutely shit writing that caused a glorious breakage in the [[skub]] dam that left [[Butthurt|many a fan's anus weeping]] (provided they weren't early seasons fans, book series fans, or any of the other assorted onlookers [[Lulz|taking part in the mightiest of keks]]) and, if anything proved <s>George's </s> Ramsay's quote at the beginning of the article true. Goddamn Dumb & Dumber, could you talentless Derp machines do any worse if you tried? Luckily, comeuppance came after them and Disney, having some sense, told them to fuck off with their [[Star Wars]] ideas after the backlash towards the final season. Not that Disney Star Wars has been without its share of controversy and [[Rage]], but you know it's bad when someone gets told to piss off from even that.

The Greatest Irony and Tragedy of the show's writing was that in the first few seasons, with George RR Martin consulting them and with a wealth of material from the first few books to work with, D&D were actually pretty damn good at adapting the books into a TV format. In fact, quite a few scenes were in fact not only adapted, but actually created from scratch outside of the source material. One of the most noteworthy is the iconic introduction of Tywin Lannister in Season 1 Episode 7, where we learn everything we need to know about his character with nothing but precisely chosen dialogue and a rather blunt visual metaphor of him gutting a stag he slew in a hunt, all while brutally laying into Season 1's initially perceived villain, Jaime. Contrast this with Season 5 where the show's major decline began with blunders such as the omission of fan-favorite Lady Stoneheart, literally butchering the Dorne subplot with Martell family team-killing and changing the Sparrows' movement to a militant atheist's stereotype of religion. This decline makes a lot more sense after George himself admitted that Season 5 was the first Season where he was was really locked out of the loop.

Goes to show how much they had fallen when the well ran dry and the show' writing and adaptation process was no longer the finely honed instrument it had started as.

'''TL;DR'''

[[GM|Producers Dumb&Dumber-style change characters and railroad the plot at a whim,]] [[/d/M|the tits and ultraviolence spigot is opened even wider than the books,]] and most scenes are made for the actors to show off their skills at making their signature angry/murder/brooding/etc. faces, and wrapped it up with a season of TV soon to be discussed that even Matt Ward would be 100% justified in pointing and laughing at. Seasons 1-4 are worth your time, 7 and 8 are best ignored, and 5 and 6 are the [[Skub]] ones.

===The Final <s>Dumpster Fire</s> Season===
{{Fail}}
{{HurfDurf}}
{{Plot Armour}}

{{Topquote|If you try to do something fancy with your ending and you screw up, your audience will probably remember the botched ending more than the well run marathon|JP from Terrible Writing Advice (and advice Dumb and Dumber obviously didn't heed}})

Seasons 5, 6, and especially 7 all got their share of grief from people. Mostly deserved in the case of Season 7 and [[Skub|arguably so]] for 5 and 6 (though the latter did at least finally give Ramsay his just desserts, most of the problems that cropped up in 5 and 6 happened when the show passed the book in particular plotlines and mostly served as an early warning, 7 is when things started getting criticized in general rather than individual plots or details). Season 8 though? Well, read on:

The Final Season kicks off with the Night King's army attacking Winterfell in a battle meant to be epic, but instead so chock full of tactical [[Fail|fails]] from the living, they make General Custer look like Sun Tzu. The most infamous examples include Melisandre's powers being underutilized, putting soldiers in front of trenches/walls they should be behind/standing on, no flanking charges and hiding the non-combatants in a crypt while fighting necromancers. The battle is resolved when Arya teleports directly to the BBEG and kills him with some sleight-of-hand that destroys his entire army Keystone Army trope-style and ends the winter. Also Theon, Jorah and Melisandre die, but the story sweeps their deaths under the rug like they're nameless background characters.

Then the Westerosi go full-retard and start hating Daenerys. Yes really; Dany helped end a nation-destroying winter plus a zombie apocalypse, has a claim to the throne AND is their best ally against Cersei... but they want her gone. Even Sansa suddenly turns against Dany and starts seeking the throne, despite having no claim to the rest of Westeros and Dany being easily able to kill her for treason. Everyone inexplicably starts wanting Jon to be king despite his attempt to abdicate, and Jon himself even starts thinking Aunt Daenerys might be a bad queen... but that doesn't stop him from [[Incest Smith|starting a sexual relationship with her]]. The fact that Robert's bastard son Gendry is now a lord, giving him a claim to the throne at least as strong as Dany's or Jon's, is swept under the rug. Varys also jumps ship from Dany to Jon for no reason, even trying to kill Dany in an uncharacteristically stupid move. For his efforts, Tyrion reports Varys to Daenerys, who has Varys executed by Drogon's fire-breath.

Then Daenerys press-gangs people who should logically be happy to fight for her into an army to attack King's Landing and brings them there by sea. Along the way Rhaegal, one of Daenerys' two surviving dragons, is killed by ballistae from Euron's ships. This is despite the facts that Daenerys and her dragons should've easily been able to spot the ships, they were flying well out of ballista range and Euron had no way of knowing where they'd be. After Daenerys and Drogon single-handedly destroy the Iron Fleet (amid poorly animated weather*), they reach King's Landing. Cersei's artillery does nothing despite Daenerys, all her advisors and her dragon being within lethal range plus Cersei's lack of scruples. They in turn do nothing but watch Daenerys' friend Missandei, who was captured offscreen earlier, get executed by zombie-Gregor (despite the fact Cersei and co. had no reason to believe Missandei was anyone of import to either capture or execute. Maybe someone left a copy of the script in Cersei's solar next to her Starbucks latte**)

The battle for King's Landing has Daenerys' forces break in and battle through the streets. Meanwhile Jaime snuck though the tunnels [[Fail|to find and reconcile with Cersei. The Hound regresses to his old violent self and tracks down zombie-Gregor to take him down in a battle that kills them both (although most consider this the one bright spot in the episode). Arya gives up on revenge and decides to let Cersei go despite having strong non-revenge-related reasons to kill her]]. The famed Golden Company is quickly killed off and Cersei signals a surrender by ringing the bells (the bells aren't, and have never been, signals for surrender). Then, in the capstone of bad writing for this season, Daenerys' switch flips from good to evil because the writers want it to happen, and Dany abandons her plan of freeing and leading Westeros to purging King's Landing with her dragon and army. Cersei and Jamie die together in a cave-in and Tyrion mourns their deaths despite being ready and eager to personally kill Cersei earlier. This is followed by Dany's Saruman/Hitler-esque speech that has nothing to do with her former character. Tyrion is arrested for criticizing Daenerys by saying "If this is liberation, I don't believe in liberation theology." Yes, [[Derp|the writers think theology and ideology are the same thing]] (an unsurprising mistake, given they shoehorned in anti-religious rants for the past three Seasons despite the books' even-handedness). This last one has proven to be its own personal bit of Skub, as many have argued that Daenerys going evil is in keeping with the cynical themes and tone of the setting. While this isn't wrong on its face, it does nothing to change the fact that the execution is 100% half-assed. Walter White's descent into villainy this is not, or even Anakin's arc in the Star Wars Prequels, which looks like The Godfather compared to what Season 8 does with Daenerys.

In the aftermath, Jon assassinates Daenerys for the King's Landing massacre... [[Derp|right in front of her dragon]]. Drogon, due to Jon's stronger-than-Valyrian-steel-plot-armor, doesn't kill him but melts the Iron Throne ([[What|accidentally according to the showrunners]]) while chucking a tantrum before grabbing Dany's body and flying away. Jon is somehow charged with Dany's murder despite there being no evidence that he did it, but surprisingly none of the surviving characters still loyal to Dany try to kill Jon (such as the Unsullied or the Dothraki). Despite there being several legitimate choices of king still available, including Gendry, the nobles decide to replace a dynastic monarchy with an elective one and make Bran king. Bran is nominated by Tyrion for a nonsensical reason ("he has the best story"), Tyrion somehow getting a say in the meeting despite being imprisoned for treason.

The Unsullied go to Southros under command of Grey Worm (the only one who still has a personality at this point). The Dothraki are forgotten about by everyone else. Tyrion is freed and made Hand of the King to Brann. Brienne is made Commander of the Kingsguard. [[Derp|Bronn is made Master of Coin (and Lord of Highgarden) despite him not knowing how financial loans work. Gendry is completely forgotten. Samwell is made the new Grand Maester]] and [[What|the North secedes and becomes independent under Queen Sansa (which definitely wouldn't cause future problems and tensions)]]. [[The Lord of the Rings|Arya sails to the West]] for some unknown reason and Jon is exiled but doesn't care because he gets to go back up north with the Wildings like he wanted. The end.

This trainwreck of a plot is a testament to how two morons can royally fuck up a show beyond any redeeming qualities the cast and crew can put forward. And even then there were screw-ups among the production staff, such as *the animators being unable to decide whether the sky is sunny or overcast when Dany and Drogon destroy the Iron Fleet - which mattered because Dany's plan to not get shot down involved having the sun behind her - and **not removing the actors' water bottles and coffee cups from the set before shooting. Hyperbole is sort of the norm here, but it really is hard to overstate how badly Season 8's finale fucks up. Game of Thrones was ''everywhere'' culturally for most of the 2010s, drawing in huge numbers of people who would otherwise never be caught dead indulging in High Fantasy works with us uber-nerds. Now, the entire Thrones fandom has practically disappeared or gone underground. Honestly, it would be an impressive achievement if it weren't so terrible.

==House of the Dragon: The ''other'' TV show==

{{Topquote|If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.|Benjamin Franklin [[Star Wars:Rebels|(and also Maul when trying to kill Kanan)]]}}

Deciding that there was still a market for Game of Thrones stuff even after the last season turned the 2010s biggest pop-culture phenomenon into a laughingstock*, HBO bet the bank on some spin-offs, the first of which is now upon us. House of the Dragon is a prequel dealing with the Dance of Dragons, a civil war between two Targaryen factions that ends up consuming Westeros and everyone in it World-War style, and featuring lots of dragons fighting dragons and the standard Westeros fare of fairly bad people doing extremely bad things. Like Game of Thrones before it, it boasts a star-studded cast, a big budget, and a lot of hype. Time will tell if it redeems the failures of the original show or repeats them. If there's a reason to be optimistic (aside from Dumb and Dumber being absent), it would be that the whole story of the Dance of Dragons is written and mapped out, meaning the writers don't have to come up with their own shit to make an ending that George hasn't yet written. Has gotten off to a strong start, so there's the hope that it will be able to redeem the legacy GoT's last two seasons absolutely ruined.

*Given that the premiere was apparently so widely watched it crashed the streaming for many people, they might actually be right.

Ultimately, with Martin having more oversight over the writing of this series, and director Miguel Sapochnik actually having a passion for the setting and genre rather than just answering a mystery question to GRRM's satisfaction, the current 6 episodes have seen sky high bumps in both HBO viewership and rave reviews. The slow burn over years as the characters inch closer towards disaster has left the majority of viewers on a palpable knife's edge so far. By the time the 1st season wrapped up, the show had garnered enough praise and profit to warrant the green light by HBO for work on the next season, with out of the park critical and commercial praise, in most cases surpassing its Amazon LOTR contemporary ''Rings of Power'' with just a third of the budget per episode. In fact, George Martin was so moved by the performance of Paddy Considine as King Viserys Targaryen, that he stated that he wished he could tear out all that he wrote about the character in his books and rewrite it to match the show version.

==GRRM and [[Your Dudes]]==
Want to make your own ASoIF setting for a role-playing game? Well, readers have enough room to fantasize about their own minor noble House (or kingdom during the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms).

A good example of what you could do is the House from the old [[/v/|"Telltale Game of Thrones"]], House Forrester. Their relationship to the canon is as follows:

House Forrester (lords of someplace in the Wolfswood) '''-> is sworn to ->''' House Glover (overall lords of the entire Wolfswood) '''-> is sworn to ->''' House Stark (rulers of the North).

[[Fantasy Flight Games]] had a very brief tie-in making those annoying attention-sucking Facebook games, way back when FFG did that sort of thing. Just goes to show how even the other guys [[Games Workshop|will do anything for money]].

There's also an actual tie-in tabletop RPG now, which uses its own system and looks kind of like [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]] with a heavy helping of resource-management strategy feel.
Players are assuming the role of a minor House to guide to glory, or, more accurately given the setting we're in, NOT to ruin utterly in a season or two, which would still be more than many A-list players mustered in canon. Each PC has a specific position within said House, and only the role of official Head is mandatory; the rest could be wife/children/brothers and sisters/all other kinds of siblings, bastards (with rules for obtaining the legitimate recognition), maesters, sworn/subservient knights, or most of anybody else. This naturally opens up near-infinite possibilities for families screwed up seven ways to high heavens, which would make Lannister's brand of infighting-slash-inbreeding look as sane as the High Septon.

The setting is also ill-suited for "adventures in Westeros" style of gaming for two reasons:
#In the grim darkness of low fantasy, a roaming nobody with no banner to talk about, no House allegiance, no nothing isn't generally treated to a Tavern With Quest Givers, but rather more to a Tavern Where You Are Shanked For Your Sword And Boots And Dumped At The Nearest Forest. Heck, even the big wheelers and dealers are routinely seen invited to the latter when they are slow to properly introduce themselves.
#Working on your initially-puny House will quite realistically involve thy neighbours first and foremost, then liege lords from the higher House yours is sworn to, and on occasion shopping around for an advantageous marriage - there simply ain't gonna be that much spare time to "travel to see places". Both of these are also why tourism wasn't a very popular pastime in medieval Europe (aside from Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Cologne and Santiago de Compostela) and why those who were "living on the road" usually enjoyed the lowest social standing.

A note to aspiring Lords: do NOT, under any circumstances, allow your "combat-optimized" siblings an unsupervised minute in a social setting. Game's "social combat" system is a thing more brutal than the physical one, and it takes a socially-optimized character all of a few minutes to mindfuck one who is not (read: everyone but dedicated diplomats and Heads of the Houses, and not every one of the latter, to boot, as illustrated by several amazing boneheads in canon) into believing pretty much anything short of Grumpkins and Snarks. Stupid NPCs or a stupid GM will make said mindfuck obvious, allowing you to "mindfuck 'em back" without abuse of OOC info; cunning ones will not.

On a side-note; GRRM is said to take a dim view of fanfiction, saying it kills creative ability. This is kind of a double-edged statement, since a lot of George's characters here are either rehashes of his characters from previous works, references to other fictional characters (like Littlefinger and Samwell being based on Jay Gatsby and [[The Lord of the Rings|Samwise Gamgee]]), walking tropes (such as Ned Stark and Robb Stark being the "[[TVTropes|Honor Before ]] [[Lawful Stupid|Reason]]" characters) or historical references (such House Lannister ripping off House Lancaster and House Tyrell being totally-not-House-Tudor - to the point that Margaery Tyrell is played by Natalie Dormer from "The Tudors" TV show). While this makes everything he wrote just another...fanfiction, and his disapproval hypocritical. Still, given the "creative" output of the average neckbeard, he's perhaps not entirely wrong. For another layer of irony/hypocrisy, he sold the rights to make a TV series of the books to HBO, who's adaptation would eventually devolve into a glorified fanfic.

==Games==
[[image:AGot-2nd-ed-cardfan.png|thumb|250px]]
Like any fantasy author who finds themselves unexpectedly in the warm embrace of commercial success, Martin quickly licensed the shit out of his setting; spawning everything from resin miniatures to replica great swords. While most of this is worthless junk to foist on [[Neckbeard|obsessive fanboys]] /tg/ has agreed that a few of the games are made of win. The first two are a collectable [[CCG|card game]] put out in 2002 by [[Fantasy Flight Games]] and a [[Risk]]-esque board game that followed shortly after in 2003. One of [[White Wolf]]'s subsidiaries also put out a [[d20 System|d20 RPG]] in 2005 but it quickly tanked because, come on, [[White Wolf]]. Martin since wrested the rights back and developed a new version with [[Green Ronin Games]].

Now let's have some serious talks about the Game of Thrones games, because they have become some sort of endless source of [[Skub|amusement and frustration]] for the gaming fanbase. Game of Thrones is, roughly speaking, the second franchise with the most licensed board games, after [[Star Wars]]. Some of them have acquired quite a legendary status and a fanbase that goes beyond the book or series fans.

The great juggernaut for all the ASOIAF-based games is [[Fantasy Flight Games]]:
* First and foremost we have [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/a-game-of-thrones-the-board-game-second-edition/ ''A Game of Thrones: The Board Game'']: a game that after two editions still ranks high in /bgg/'s top 100, and has recently had an expansion. The board game has become some sort of meme for the modern board gamers and it could be considered the equivalent of a more advanced [[Risk]], in which dice and blank character got replaced by a very flavourful and brutal combat system and a lot of thematical mechanics fueling the engine. Overall this game has been associated with concepts such as requiring maximum player count to really be entertaining, having an amazing amount of length and depth and being a very faithful representation of the political feeling the series inspired. Almost any boardgamer or wargamer worth his salt has played this game and enjoyed its highs, its lows and the amazing amount of frustrations it brings. This is probably the most well known of all the ASOIAF games and it was released way before Game of Thrones was a cultural phenomenon back in 2003.<br>
:It also has a digital edition, sold on Steam and Android

* Another game that bears mention, both for its excellent mechanics and its historical significance is [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/a-game-of-thrones-the-card-game-second-edition/ A Game of Thrones: The Card Game]. It is one of the most balanced card game experiences you can get, also full of flavour and with quite a great amount of balance and non-linear thinking. The best part is, unlike certain other popular card games, the game follows the living card game format: players know exactly what each booster pack brings and can buy cards in a more responsible manner, rather than playing bingo and hoping to get a rare card. Also, the sole core set already provides more replayability than some fully-fledged board games.

* Finally, the last game to mention in the [[Fantasy Flight Games|FFG]] venerable trilogy of games is [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/battles-of-westeros/ ''Battles of Westeros''], arguably the most ambitious and least successful of the three. Battles of Westeros was a fully-fledged wargame that used the [[Memoir 44]] and [[BattleLore]] rules as a base, but then evolved into its own by introducing mechanics such as commanders, tactic cards, and very creative scenario rules. Miniatures were made in 15mm and, for their time and scale, they were quite detailed; some commanders are real standouts (for example, Robb Stark's has his direwolf jumping at his side).<br>
:Thanks to its scale, the game was able to provide players with a great number of options and units at a fraction of the price of other board games. With a core set that was already stacked with units and variety, and then faction-specific expansions that added several more units and commanders. The game also came with scenario books that provided narrative play with quite creative rule variants, such as storming palisades, having decoys in escort missions, and bombarding enemies with catapults. One scenario even tried to bring to life the Battle of the Blackwater (the hybrid invasion of King's Landing by Stannis ''the God-Damn Mannis'' Baratheon). The game was incredible and quite a creative wargame, but its main issue was that the setup time was just terrible. Incredibly complex and tiresome when compared to the actual gameplay time.

There are others, such as the ASOIAF-themed [[Settlers of Catan|Catan]] expansion called [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/a-game-of-thrones-catan-brotherhood-of-the-watch/ ''A Game of Thrones Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch''], another card game called [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/hand-of-the-king/ ''A Game of Thrones: Hand of the King''], and another board game [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/game-of-thrones-the-iron-throne/#/products-section ''Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne'']. The quality of those, however, remains to be seen.

And then the miniature-producing Kickstarter juggernaut [[CMON]] decided to produce its own [[wargame]], with AMAZING miniatures. The game began with, of course, a [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cmon/a-song-of-ice-and-fire-tabletop-miniatures-game Kickstarter], and after that, the game has had at least 2 dozen more releases with 3 more factions added.<br>
The game has some mechanics taken from rank and file games, such as [[Kings of War]], combining them with mechanics taken out of "battles of Westeros" particularly the tactics deck. A new page is in the works: [[ASOIAF Miniature Game]]

==Books==
*''A Game of Thrones''
*''A Clash of Kings''
*''A Storm of Swords'':
*''A Feast for Crows'': half the characters, the point where the series goes down the toilet: most of the pov characters in AFFC are either unlikeable (Cersei, Sansa, Arianne) or are downright side characters of little consequence (Greyjoys, all of the other Martells); most of the characters you're actually reading the books for are in Dance, which is even longer than this book
*''A Dance with Dragons'': split into 2 the first is about the other half of the characters, and manages to pick things up a bit
*''The Winds of Winter'': First rumored to be ready by late 2018, then given an official release date of Summer 2020, those times have come and gone and the book is unreleased. Though he has shared chapters of the book. In 2022 he claimed to be "75% done". By extrapolation he should be done in 2026.
*''A Dream of Spring'' : Unreleased and unlikely to ever be.
** GRRM will most likely die before writing this, as he confirmed multiple times he hasn't even begun working on it and will only do so once he is done with Winds, though he has given an outline for how he wants the series to end that might be made public knowledge if he dies before the book series is finished.
*''The Dunk and Egg Series'': A story about a landless hedge knight travelling across Westeros with a Targaryen squire, so he can teach him how not to be an asshole to peasants. Consists of three small novels, with the fourth one being essentially ready (it was supposed to be published in a Dangerous Women anthology, but was shelved by Martin).
*''Fire and Blood'': Martin's Silmarillion (it even had a GRRMarillion working title at one point) that details the rule of Targaryen kings since the Conquest up until Robert's Rebellion. Only one tome, which abruptly ends on King Aegon III sixteen birthday, was relased, with the second one being released <s>never</s> after Winds of Winter.
**''Sons of the Dragon'': standalone chapter that was released 2 years before full FoF, detailing reigns of Aenys and Maegor.
**''Rogue Prince'': chapter about King Viserys' reign on which most of HOTD's Season 1 is based.
**''The Princess and The Queen'': chapter about Dance of Dragons (do not be confused with Dance ''with'' Dragons).

==On The "Grimdarkness" of the Setting==

One important note: While the setting is usually held to be "Grimdark", it is also very true to Real Life in its nastiness, with real consequences for assholes. George himself has said, quote; "No matter how much I make up, there's stuff in history that's just as bad, or worse." Book one is almost exactly the beginning of the War of the Roses, except with England enlarged to a continent's size and the seasons stretched out to let the travel times work. (...And then the dragons wake up, the ice elves and their undead armies return and magic makes a comeback. It's not a perfect analogy. All that stuff is closed in their own sub plots and they don't involve the main continent in the book, that is left to "common" war and plotting.)

For an example of Grimdark, but with consequences: The King can order the execution of the head of the leading noble family of the North, for essentially no reason, but now he doesn't have hostages to exchange when their relatives and/or armies come after him seeking revenge. (And all this is modeled on various occasions where more or less '''exactly''' this kind of thing happened in real life medieval Europe.)

In other words: Truly heinous shit goes on, and there's nothing ''stopping'' that kind of shit... but there are ''consequences'' to that kind of shit that act as an effective counterbalance against being seen to do that kind of shit to the smarter nobles in the kingdom. And, because anyone can die, the shittiest characters are no more guaranteed survival than the nicest.

Also worth mentioning that there's reason to think that, despite the quote that began this page, the series may not actually end on [[The End Times|100% downer note]], as Martin has said he hopes his series will end in a way akin to the Scouring of the Shire from Lord of the Rings, which, despite the name, is more of a bittersweet ending. So who knows (though this also presumes the author will actually get around to finishing the series at all).

In sum, whether the setting fully qualifies for "Grimdark" is a matter for debate. Probably the best way of looking at is that it is Grimdark, but in a nuanced way.

==See Also==
*[[/tg/ Song of Ice and Fire Houses]]
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U7NpSubAJQ Weiner, Weiner weiner]

[[category: Literature]]

A Song of Ice and Fire

2023-03-02T03:53:28Z

2A02:8070:8E81:DD40:0:0:0:C711: /* Locations */

[[image:Game_of_Thrones_Title-DVD.png|300px|thumb|WIENER PARTY! WIENER PARTY!]]

{{Spoilers}}
{{Grimdark}}
{{Sick|Among other things, the books can barely go ten pages without having another rape.}}
'''Warning: This article contains so many spoilers we're ruining books that haven't even been released yet.'''

{{Topquote|If you think this story has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.|Ramsay Bolton, nailing the grimdark theme of this series}}

{{Topquote|It matters not from whence the blood flows. Only that it flows.|George RR Martin, Exalted Champion of Khorne when explaining why so many characters get offed}}

'''''A Song of Ice and Fire''''', better known as '''''Game of Thrones''''' (though only the first book has that title) is a [[Grimdark]] fantasy book series for people who hate fantasy, or at the very least, have gotten their fill of Tolkien pretenders and want something more "distinct". Its central themes include [[Tzeentch|political Machiavellian scheming]], [[Khorne|ultraviolence]], [[Slaanesh|incest/sex with exposition/tons of rape]], and [[Nurgle|everyone trying to survive in such a Crapsack World of perpetual suffering]]. There is also lots and lots of food. Thus it has become one of the most popular series of our generation and its author, [[George R. R. Martin]], has been praised for his highly realized world and gritty low fantasy style. He was even called "the American [[Tolkien]]" by <s>Time magazine</s> gormless idiots who lump diametrically different writers together for no other reason than that they're both fantasy authors. The two authors do both have a passion (and talent) for worldbuilding and writing doorstoppers, but that's also where the similarities generally end. Still, the comparisons to Tolkien would probably explain this series' sudden spike in popularity following the TV show (at least [[Skub|to a point, anyway.]]) The great joke of an actual World War veteran writing fantasy about heroic knights and elves being compared to and contrasted with a conscientious objector who writes edgy fantasy is not lost on most (though its worth mentioning that Martin is as much of a Tolkien buff as any of us, meaning that he didn't write the series as a "fuck you" to Tolkien's work as some might assume).

The series itself is set on the [[Original character, do not steal|totally not medieval European ripoff]] realm of Westeros as it is wracked by a massive succession war drawing its realms into conflict. Everyone's picking up the pieces from the previous war until one family's bid for power starts another war (book one), A bunch of dudes declare themselves kings (book two), they're burning the continent down in their scramble for power, and somehow all the fuck-ups managed to lose anyway (book three). Just when the guys who lost the least start thinking they get to rule over the remaining chaos, more fuck ups happen and more dudes show up (book four). Sadly, winter has finally come and, unbeknownst to most people, [[Thousand Sons|evil ice wizards leading soulless undead]] [[Alpha Legion|assumed to be only myths by most people]] are about to invade the continent from the north. By the fifth book, things are going and/or will go to shit even for the bad guys.

According to a leaked fan conversation, George R. R. Martin jokingly stated the series would end with an epic cock-slap fight between Samwell Tarly and Jaime Lannister.

TL;DR: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Roses War of Roses] with a helpin' of <s>cliched fantasy</s> George's old sci-fi writing plots given a fantasy overhaul and [[/d/]]-lite.

[[ASOIAF Miniature Game|Miniature game has their own page now]]

== Setting and History ==
Most of the series takes place on an America-sized continent named Westeros, which stretches from pretty much the North Pole to the deserts of Dorn. It is populated by three main nations: First Men (Northmen and wildlings aka not!Celts), Andals (pretty much everyone else aka not!Anglo-Saxons) and Rhoynar (Dornishmen). All of them came from Essos in waves: the First Men displacing the druids and giants, then came the Andals who pushed the First Men further north and assimilated the survivors, and finally by the Rhoynar, a matriarch-ish society that fled the destruction of their homeland and finally found a home in Dorne. Ironborn (not!Vikings from western islands) are also of note, since despite their First Men ancestry, they developed an entirely different religion and culture based off raiding due to the barren sea-rocks they inhabit ([[Deep Ones|and possibly also influenced by weird creepy things living in the water that lived on the islands before they did]])

For thousand years Westeros was an utter mess of seven-ish kingdoms vying for supremacy. But while they were busy banging rocks together, the Eastern continent, Essos, was united by the <s>elves</s> magical dragon-riders powered by incest. The Valyrians would expand all over Essos, but their only presence in Westeros was a small island outpost (later named Dragonstone). At one point, however, the daughter of a minor noble family, Daenys Targaryen, had prophetic dreams about the death of her country, which forced her father to flee alongside his family and most valuable possessions (five dragons and some magic shit). His rivals in power laughed at him, but he turned to be right as a gigantic volcanic eruption obliterated Valyria and started the age of anarchy in Essos

The Targaryens did fuck all for a little over a century, until the ambitious lord Aegon grew tired of sister-fucking and decided to forge his own kingdom in Westeros. Even though his army was tiny and he was facing off against the full might of an entire continent, he also had '''dragons''', which in ASOIAF can grow to comically large proportions, and allowed him to wipe the floor with anyone dumb enough to stand against him. Just to make a point, he burnt down *the* largest fortress in Westeros ''in a single night'', melting down stone walls with dragonfire and leaving it cursed for centuries. Though, because the Targs were so reliant on dragons, the only Kingdom they couldn't conquer was [[Dune|Dorne]], who [[Tallarn|mujahideen]]'d their way to a truce after killing one of the sister-wives' dragons with a Ballista and (probably) threatening Aegon with the knowledge that they were willing to spend their entire Kingdom's wealth to hire [[Callidus Assassin|magical assassins]] to end the Targaryen line.

The Targaryens ruled for 280 years, but their rule was also marked by lots of shitty kings (because of the rampant incest), but also by rebelling bastards (who were the result of non-incest). Somewhere along the way, magic began to leave the world. Spells were no longer as effective and the price for such magic became steeper and steeper (which is why most magic in the "present" requires blood or sacrifice of some sort). This was most evident in Westeros when the dynasty's dragons became successively smaller and smaller; it also probably didn't help that they raised them in a coliseum-style Vault and also only had 5 dragons to start with. The dynasty's fate was sealed in the "Dance of Dragons" which was an internal conflict between Targaryens and the last real war to include dragons and dragonriders.

Their ultimate downfall came just before the beginning of the series, when Prince Rhaegar (supposedly) kidnapped the bride of a powerful lord Robert Baratheon and the Mad King killed her father and brother, who just wanted her back, triggering a rebellion that they lost and once again setting the stage for a Seven Kingdom free-for-all.

==Characters==
{{cleanup}}
Since these books have some thousand named characters, you won't remember most of them without an obsessive disorder over details.
Here's a relatively shortlist (mostly based on the TV series rather than the books, but seems to randomly switch between the two) for the characters you'll care about. We'll also be making an effort to mostly focus on characters from the main series, rather than historical figures like Maegor Targaryen, the Dance of Dragons Blacks and Greens, and so on. Trust us, given the number of characters we already have to cover, it's for the best. The houses listed here doesn't even come close to covering them all, either.

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:100%">
===House Stark===

''"Winter Is Coming"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Honourable, bro-tier northerners who always [[Space Wolves|compare themselves to direwolves and have a few as pets]]. They have a tendency towards being so resolutely honorable that proves to bite them in the ass due to naivete about how [[Tzeentch|Westerosi corrupt politics actually works]] (not that dishonorable characters often fare any better, but that's an "Anyone Can Die" setting for you). They're also arguably the protagonists of the setting. Basically Scotland and/or House Lancaster in the War of the Roses (but named after House York).
* Eddard Stark, ''The Quiet Wolf'': Patriarch, lord and POV death-puppet. Not nearly as stupid as everyone tries to pretend...but still kind of stupid, and very much a dead man walking. Honorable to a fault and deeply repulsed by the politicking that goes on around him, which eventually leads to a mild case of death by decapitation. Has somewhat of a mixed reputation among the big players of Westeros; Jamie Lannister despises Ned for judging him for breaking his oath and saving millions of people in King's Landing and never listening to his side of the story, Littlefinger hates him for much, much pettier reasons (as outlined further below). Varys and Tyrion both kind of admire him, but were in agreement over the fact that Ned did the worst possible thing at the most inconvenient time and ultimately got what was coming to him.
* Benjen Stark: Ned's ranger/Night's Watch brother (so the Faramir to his Boromir), who disappears later in the story and may or may not be the mysterious "Coldhands" (in the TV show he is).
* Robb Stark, ''The Young Wolf'': Shiny, King Arthur-like hero who veers between being [[Lawful Stupid]] and [[Lion El'Johnson|a brilliant military leader]]. After waging a successful war to avenge his murdered father, he was betrothed to a noblewoman but he ended having comfort sex with a virgin noblewoman which may have been arranged by her scheming bitch mother, while in softcore porno he got the hots for a commoner. Cacks it nastily: he got his head cut off and his pet's wolf's head stuck on his body, which was paraded around while his enemies chanted "HERE COMES THE KING IN THE NORTH!" In other words, he's a Scottish [[Roman Empire|Hannibal Barca]]. In the show his pregnant wife dies with him for added Grimdark, but in the books he (wisely) leaves her behind when he goes to the Red Wedding.
* Sansa Stark: Useless teenage girl extraordinaire at the start of the series with dreams of marrying a prince and "having lots of babies", but gets shat on hard by reality, being a case-study in what happens when you go into a Grimdark world thinking like a Fairy Tale Princess. Becomes Littlefinger's replacement goldfish when Catelyn's no longer around, her father got killed and her best friend was sold as a sex slave, and ended up in the worst relationship we can possibly imagine with King Joffrey. [[Grimdark|Even got deflowered via rape by Ramsey Bolton]] and married to him before managing to escape with the help of others. Currently acting as a co-ruler to her brother/cousin Jon Snow, and has learned much from her suffering, allowing her to kick Littlefinger out of the Great Game via throat slitting. While in the book Littlefinger is/was setting her up at House Arryn to claim the Vale and the North, the show version becomes QUEEN IN DA NORF in the final episode.
* Arya Stark: Little tomboy assassin. Has a kill list, but doesn't get to use it so long as she is an amnesiac apprentice of [[Officio Assassinorum|the Friendly Neighborhood Assassins Guild]]. In the books, she's still training with the Faceless Men, but in the show she's broken away from them and headed back to Westeros to get revenge on a LOT of people, giving her one of the highest kill counts in the series. She goes home to Winterfell when she hears that Jon and Sansa took it back and starts acting as a general "troubleshooter" for Sansa while scaring the hell out of everyone with all her new assassin skillz. Kills the Night King like a fucking champion in Season 8 (though in a way that doesn't actually make any sense), then rides south to add Cersei to her body count. Instead, the Hound talks her out of it and she [[The Lord of the Rings|decides to sail into the unknown west]]. Kind of the [[Mary Sue|writer's pet]] in the show, among other things getting to avenge the Red Wedding in a brutally cinematic manner even though Dumb and Dumber justified giving us a pregnant woman getting stabbed to death on-screen because Game of Thrones is above "cliches" like loved ones getting avenged in just such a way. And her aforementioned killing of the Night King that doesn't actually make any sense, since it required her getting the drop on him in a way that was ''physically impossible without out-of-universe special effects equipment''. Book version is still level-grinding to get to her TV version's skill level.
* Catelyn Stark (nee Tully): A woman who trusts the wrong people at the worst time, causing a lot of misery. Gets killed along with Robb, then comes back (books only) as Lady Stoneheart, an undead witch bent on killing all the Boltons, Freys, Greyjoys, Lannisters... pretty much everyone she thinks was tangentially involved in betraying her and her family, or somebody who just pissed her off (kind of hard to blame her though). The show writers left this part out completely, which caused much [[rage]] and [[skub]] in the fandom.
* Bran Stark: Intelligent little boy, named after the founder of House Stark, Brandon the Builder (basically Tony Stark combined with [[Leman Russ]]). He was crippled in the first sign of major [[GrimDark]]. Has prophetic dreams and becomes a [[druid]]. In the TV series, fucks things up by alerting the Others to where he's hiding, which gets all of the Children, his loyal wolf, the Three-Eyed Crow and Hodor killed. For good measure, turns out to have accidentally ''caused'' Hodor to become, well, Hodor, as he was using his druid powers to figure out why Hodor is only able to say Hodor, resulting in Hodor's gruesome death-by-zombies being beamed directly into young Hodor's brain. He's now the Three-Eyed Raven and likes going around being creepy as fuck and generally weirding people out. Becomes King of the <s>Seven</s> Six Kingdoms in a hilariously nonsensical plot twist in the finale.
* Rickon Stark: Four years old at the start, turning into a real little [[Barbarian]] from not being raised properly, because everyone who would have raised him was dead or missing. In the books, he and his wildling nanny Osha are on the cannibal-infested island of Skagos, and Davos Seaworth is on his way there to pick them up so that the northern lords who are still loyal to House Stark have a figurehead to rally behind. In the show, he ends up hanging out at the Umbers, then is handed over to Ramsay as a prisoner when Smalljon becomes afraid of the Wildlings living north of him (who were invited by Jon Snow to fight the Zombie Apocalypse), and finally dies via arrow in a sick game of "dodge the missiles" courtesy of Ramsey.
* Jon Snow, ''The White Wolf'': A bastard living in the Stark household before leaving for the Night's Watch (basically [[The Last Chancers|Colonel Schaeffer]] with more convicted rapists under his command) and excels there because nearly every one of his fellow recruits are peasants who have never had a formal days of training while Jon has had the serious training afforded to all lords. After he takes over by becoming the Watch Commander secures and alliance with the Wildlings, ancient barbarian enemies of the Night's Watch, because when the end of the world is coming you tend to think outside the box. Also gets a Wildling girlfriend, but she dies. He was taken under the wing by the Lord Commander Jeor Mormont and given advice by Maester Aemon (a Targaryen who is so '''old''' that everyone in the south has forgotten he existed, and unbeknownst to him, his great-great-granduncle), and managed to actually be a competent leader. Sfter a disastrous loss of strength after the failure of the Great Ranging, and then the Wildling invasion, he unilaterally decides to let the Wildlings through in exchange for their aid in securing the Wall against the real enemy; he even impresses Stannis (The Mannis) with his honor and sense of justice. [[Grimdark|And then, all the corrupt exiles from the South (and the rejects who were left behind during the Ranging) banded together to kill him]].
**Though he's currently dead in the books as a result of the mutiny, he was revived by R'hllor in the series after being stabbed to death by the senior members of the Watch. Isn't actually Eddard's bastard son, but rather the legitimate son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, meaning that he is, in fact, the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. The new KING IN DA NORF according to his supporters after he killed Ramsay Bolton and took back Winterfell, and is also currently hooking up with his own aunt.
**He turns on Daenerys once he realizes she's lost it and kills her in the throne room, but [[Plot Armor|for some reason her dragon doesn't kill him despite seeing him do the the deed]]. The Unsullied want his head, but instead, King Bran exiles him to the Night's Watch and he fucks off into the far north to live with the Free Folk.
* Hodor: Hodor. Hodor, Hodor, Hodor. <s>An enormous and possibly retarded stable boy, and Bran's faithful steed.</s> Hodor. Ok, in all actual seriousness, this guy is probably one of the most tragic figures in this series (and that's saying something). [[Grimdark|The guy basically received horrible visions of his own death fighting a horde of zombies, buying time for his friends to escape by literally holding the door shut as he was hacked apart]]. This causes him to suffer a mental break, leading him to develop Immature Personality Disorder and making it so the only thing he can say is a garbled version of his friend's last request "hold the door" for all of his adult life; the logic here is that "hold the door" devolves into "hol' th' door" and eventually "Hodor". You now feel bad for at laughing at the guy.
* Osha: A Wildling woman who surrendered to the Starks and becomes their servant in exchange for not getting killed. Now dead in the show thanks to Ramsay's dickery, costing the cast another valued waifu.</div></div>

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===House Targaryen===

''"Fire and Blood"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The former Dragon kings and rulers of Westeros, [[Eldar|fair-haired purple-eyed beautiful people]] who have descended from the [[Dark Age of Technology|ancient technologically-advanced superpower]] of [[Roman Empire|Valyria]], which collapsed because of [[Fall of the Eldar|their colossal hubris]]. After the anarchic [[Age of Strife|Century of Blood]], the Targaryen patriarch Aegon I, instead of reconquering the lost cause of Essos and of Valyria's former empire, looked towards the rather primitive continent of Westeros, and its squabbling Seven Kingdoms, [[Great Crusade|to establish his own Imperial dynasty and unify the Realm]]. Aegon I is essentially the Low Fantasy version of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Conqueror William the Conqueror] and/or the [[God-Emperor of Mankind]], with a little dash of [[/d/|incest]].

[[Rules Lawyer|Thanks to a loophole]], the Targaryens were immune to the moral objections relating to incest. Common sense (and common decency) took back seat to a time-honoured policy of [[/d/|catastrophic inbreeding]], which made a number of problems, the most obvious of which was that a whole bunch of them were fucking crazy. Aegon I married his older and younger sisters and had several kids with each, which would be the start of another Targaryen tradition: the occasional succession crisis. Because GRRM can't write a book without going off on a tangent (and because the Targaryens were running things for a good chunk of the setting's history), the Targaryens and their 300ish long legacy is full of rebellions and wars ripped from English History and in turn mined by HBO. Fun interregnums include the Dance of Dragons, where the Targaryens used the last of their dragons in a brutal civil-war against each other (and now a TV show), and the Blackfyre Rebellions, where the fat-fuck Aegon IV (who had Henry VII's opposite problems: he fucked everyone and had many heirs) legitimized all his bastards and even gifted one of them the dynasty's greatest treasure: the Blackfyre sword. Actually, considering how ''much'' of these rebellions were caused by half-Targaryen bastards, [[/d/|maybe they had a point?]]

Eventually, the lineage was banished to Essos after a brutal civil war: Aerys II, a crazy paranoid king that savagely executed many different people, made the wrong move of executing the Lord and Heir of the North; the two men were in King's Landing because Aery's son, Rhaegar, the '''non''-crazy one, eloped/abducted Robert Baratheon's fiance and their sister. Since he was already married and she was engaged, they left together in secret, which caused Robert the Cuck to go wild. Joining with Eddard, the new Lord of the North, and their teacher/foster-dad Jon Arryn, the three Kingdoms rebelled and Robert warhammered Rhaegar because STR > DEX.

The survivors were smuggled out/hidden from Robert, with Viserys and his then-pregnant mother hiding on their ancestral home of Dragonstone first, before fucking off to Essos when the war was truly lost; Rhaegar's ''first'' son and daughter were killed and his wife raped by the Lannister's bannermen, though Rhaegar's best friend [[Gay|who loved him very, very, very much]] claims to have helped sneak him out of Westeros and hides with him in Essos; finally, Rhaegar and Lyanna's son, Jon/Aegon, was adopted by Ned, who was made to realize that the entire civil war was a misunderstanding and that his whoremongering drunk of a foster brother would've probably been a terrible brother-in-law anyway. [[Grimdark]]. Basically, the entire British royal family, but with more incest, and a lot of dragons. Still, they occasionally did have genuinely good people like Aegon V (aka Egg), Jaeherys I the Conciliator, his wife Good Queen Alysanne and complete badasses like Brynden Bloodraven and Baelor Breakspear (too bad Bloodraven is hooked up to Old God wi-fi permanently and Breakspear died before he could become king).
Pseudo-Romans and/or the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Normandy House of Normandy].

* Aerys II, ''The Mad King'': [[Kharn|A pretty fun guy to be around]]. Had a psychotic fascination for fire, which extended to being a psychotic fascination for burning traitors, a category of people that eventually grew to include anybody he disliked for any reason, anyone who disagreed with him, and a few people who were unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire. [[Goge Vandire|Teamkilled by his bodyguard Jaime for planning to burn the city down with everyone inside it, and even refused to accept his death until he actually died]].
* Daenerys Targaryen, ''Stormborn'': She was sold by her brother to a barbarian leader [[Genghis motherfucking Khan|Khal (warlord) Drogo]] in exchange for the promise that he'd use his Khalassar (Warband/tribe) to conquer Westeros. She found her self esteem as his wife, then her husband killed her idiot brother Viserys and promised to conquer the world for Daenerys, making her a full-fledged badass barbarian war queen. Unfortunately, her husband died when [[Derp|Daenerys trusted one of the slaves whose town Drogo had pillaged and burnt to heal an infected wound of his]] and his horde fell apart (though the book is somewhat ambiguous as to whether the slave did kill Drogo). Then she hatched three dragons (completely by accident when she tried to commit suicide) bringing them back from extinction, and now everyone wants to marry her because she is now one of the most powerful people around due to said dragons and being good-looking (in the books this is by the age-of-consent in Westeros standards, where girls are women when they start getting their periods and boys are men at age 13). [[Gets shit done]] except the entire fifth book, in which she mopes around about wanting to marry an annoying, flamboyant mercenary instead of saving herself for political marriage. After banging the flamboyant mercenary, she later marries a Meereenese noble who guarantees he can get her some peace (more likely [[Just As Planned|just as he planned]]).
**She also does nothing while insurgents kill her men, a horde of plagued refugees spread disease to her city and standing idly by while an enemy army besieges her walls, all for realistically political reasons because the world is a horrible place. Learns how to train her dragon. In the books she's just encountered another Khalassar after being hauled away from Meereen by Drogo. In the TV series, she takes over all the Dothraki and adds them to her army, then heads for Westeros to invade the place with her army of elite hoplites, massive horde of Dothraki and her dragons. By the time she gets to King's Landing she's taken significant losses, including two of her dragons, and is fucking her nephew (Jon Snow). Officially went Mad Queen as of S8E5, wherein she burned most of King's Landing after the city attempted to surrender and has decided to "liberate" everyone on the planet, whether they want it or not. Jon kills her in the series finale so that she won't go around burninating the rest of the world.
* The dragons: The three dragons that Daenerys hatched. They're wyverns that breathe fire, [[Awesome|have blood hot enough to melt steel]], and [[List of /tg/ Cuisine|cook their meat before eating it]]. Naturally, some of the coolest things in the story.
** Drogon; named for her late husband, Khal Drogo. Black and red, the biggest and [[Gork|most aggressive dragon]]. Starts eating people and then escapes, leading to the other two getting imprisoned. Interrupts a gladiator tournament, killing a lot of people before being whipped by Daenerys into flying her to a Khalassar that broke off from her husband's after his death. In the show, he's the last dragon standing after Viserion bites it north of the Wall and his undead body is put down at Winterfell and Rhaegal gets shot down over Dragonstone. Takes Dany's body, destroys the Iron Throne and fucks off to who knows where after Dany is killed.
** Rhaegal; named for the first of her dead brothers, Rhaegar. Green and gold, the [[Mork|cunning one]] and the loudest (with a roar "...that would have sent a hundred lions fleeing,"). Kills Quentyn Martell when the latter is trying to goad Viserion (see below). After breaking out of jail with Viserion they go "all your base are belong to us" on Meereen, killing people and taking over the pyramid of a loyal family as his lair. Last seen playing "sack the town" with Viserion in the books. Dead in the show thanks to Euron Greyjoy and some Diabolus ex Machina bullshit.
** Viserion; named for her other brother Viserys. White and gold and the [[Vulkan|friendliest]] (as dragons go, he still eats people). Dug cave for himself in his jail then moved into another pyramid after his and his brother's great escape. Gets killed by the [[Vampire Counts|Night's King in the show via a magic spear, then his corpse is reanimated to be the Night King's zombie dragon steed]] and blasts a hole in the famous Wall, allowing the armies of snow elves and zombies to start flooding Westeros. Now perma-dead thanks to the Night King biting it.
* Viserys Targaryen, ''The Beggar King'': Daenerys' physically abusive older brother. Best known for being a bully with incestuous lust for her, and an arrogant and incompetent fuck with a massive sense of entitlement. He eventually got himself killed for being an all-around jerk and whiny idiot, which culminated in him threatening his sister and unborn nephew with a sword while drunk in a sacred Dothraki place where weapons and bloodshed are forbidden on pain of death (execution is done by bloodless death - having a scarf wrapped tight around the neck and being drowned in a barrel). Daenerys' husband [[awesome|poured molten gold over his head and called it his promised crown, also ensuring his death didn't technically shed any blood in their sacred place]].
* Aegon Targaryen, ''Aegon VI'': Daenerys' nephew, the son of her brother Rhaegar. Been hiding in Essos for the entire length of the series, but recently raised an army of Westerosi exiles and threw them all a massive Welcome Home party with rape and pillage. Wants to marry his aunt because she has dragons, ''and might not actually be a member of House Targaryen'' if you believe some fans. He can actually count past 6, can multiply numbers, can read different language and has a minor understanding of geometry thus cementing him as one of the most educated people in this overwrought series. Can also do his own laundry.
**Like Dany, he has his own band of misfits following him around. While Dany has Dothraki and Unsullied, Aegon has '''The Golden Company''', a mercenary company of ten thousand, descended from the forces loyal to the Blackfyre bastards. The Golden Company has a long and storied history of invading Westeros and failing, which has led to the theories that Aegon is really a Blackfyre. Because of their long history and descent from actual nobles, the Golden Company is nothing like the mercenary rabble common in the rest of the series, even having dedicated knight, archer, and War Elephant divisions.
* Brynden Rivers ''Bloodraven'': A Targaryen bastard who came to prominence about a hundred years before the series as a sort of sorcerer, he later became known as the "Three-Eyed Raven/Crow" after encountering the Children of the Forest, and uses his powers to help advert the Long Night and train Bran. He's described as having long, white hair, missing an eye, bound to a tree, knows all and sees all, associated heavily with ravens and omens... [[Vikings|yeah, he's very much Odin, come to think of it. Just a lot more of an asshole than the Warrior King of legend.]]
**In his prime, he was pretty much just Loki. The Spymaster ''and'' Hand of the King during the Blackfyre Rebellions (a rebellion of all Aegon IV's many bastards, [[Troll|who he legitimized on his deathbed because that's how he rolled]]), he was one of the few to remain loyal. He was a sorceror and had a spy network so thorough, it was a commmon-joke that the [[Magnus the Red|one-eyed]] sorcerer had "[[Thousand Sons|a thousand eyes]], and [[Tzeentch|one]]" He had his own elite unit of archers that solved the first rebellion by sticking the claimant, his heir, and finally his twin, full of arrows.
**Exiled to the Night's Watch after assassinating after assassinating a Blackfyre after promising him safe passage, a running theme in ASOIAF.
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===House Lannister===

''"Hear Me Roar"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">[[Monopoly|Westeros' richest family]], proud, pompous, selfish and fabulous assholes. Not much of a martial tradition but if you cross them [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7t7cnwlOgY they will fucking cut you]. You can tell they are the bad guys because they have an army of sick fucks, including a zebra-riding mercenary band and 7' 8" Khornate Champion <s>not-Goliath</s> Gregor Clegane. House York (though named after House Lancaster) combined with the House of Rothschild and the Mafia. Their unofficial motto is "A Lannister Always Pays His Debts"
* Tywin Lannister, ''The Lion of Lannister'': The Godfather, head of the house, and obsessed with his reputation as a Magnificent Bastard extraordinaire. Lawful Evil Personified. He was a most feared general whose greatest achievement was [[Exterminatus|erasing House Reyne from existence]], which was immortalised in his own sweet-yet-creepy-as-fuck theme song (The Rains of Castamere) that became used as a warning against anyone standing against him. During his tenure as Hand of the King (i.e. Prime Minister), he was a political genius who operated as the true power behind the Iron Throne, keeping the realm stable and prosperous despite the stupidity of Aerys II and Joffrey. However, despite all of his achievements, he's an [[Emperor|absolutely terrible father]], who treats his children as nothing more than tools to further his political agenda. He completely overlooks the incestuous relationship his two oldest children had, and hated Tyrion and made his life a living hell for very poor reasons. He humiliated Tyrion whenever it wouldn't threaten the family's reputation, berated Tyrion for being a whore-monger despite secretly being one himself (this is ''only'' in the show), [[Grimdark|tried to get him killed multiple times]], and as the capstone of awful parenting, he taught Tyrion not to marry commoners after he married one called Tysha - by forcing Tyrion to watch Tysha get gang-raped, forcing him to rape her too and then annulling their marriage. The only person Tywin truly loved was his wife. He eventually gets his comeuppance when Tyrion finds out the truth about the Tysha incident and kills him with a crossbow, all while mentioning that out of all his children, Tyrion was the most alike to Tywin himself. He's based on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Neville,_16th_Earl_of_Warwick Warwick the Kingmaker].
* Joanna Lannister: Tywin's late wife and first cousin, meaning the next three characters are inbred as well, ironically. Dies giving birth to Tyrion, which is part of why Tywin hates him, though Cersei hates him for other reasons. Caught wind of Cersei and Jaime's incestuous tendencies, but she died before she could tell Tywin. It is implied that her ghost visits Jaime in a dream and mourns the current state of her family.
* Cersei Lannister, ''Bitch Queen'': Tywin and Joanna's first child. Twin sister to Jaime Lannister and wife to King Robert Baratheon. She fucks her brother Jaime all the time and had three of his children, whom she passed off as Robert's to grab power. She is a massive narcissist who thinks of herself as "female Tywin" and hence seeks to rule Westeros as the Queen, and will do anything to keep her power... even when [[Abbadon the Despoiler|most of her plans end up becoming utter failures]]. Crazy as all fuck and prophesied to be killed by the "little brother." This is because of a prophecy made by a witch, Cersei was a child that she'd be a beautiful queen, lose everything, her children would die before her, and the "Valonqar" would kill her. Though that does explain why she hates Tyrion as hard as all fuck, [[Just As Planned|the exact translation of the term]] that was used is "younger sibling", and not necessarily her sibling, which opens the door to all sorts of characters who hate the fuck out of her. Since Jaime is technically younger by a few seconds, him killing Cersei would be an interesting twist not without buildup. Possibly the Witch was messing with her head because of what a bitch Cersei was being to her, something Cersei never grew out of. Cersei is currently alive only because Varys wants her to be, [[Just As Planned|as she's a terrible queen who'll destabilize the realm enough for him to bring back the Targaryens]]. She was completely shaved, stripped of power in all but her royal heritage and forced to do a nude walk of penance throughout the city by the High Sparrow (ASOIAF Pope- equivalent/[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther Martin Luther] except he won the Reformation) after he uncovered her crimes. Now she's waiting for her hair to grow back and maybe thinking of revenge.
**She gets it in the show by blowing up the Great Sept of Baelor (ASOIAF [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Cathedral Canterbury Cathedral]) with everyone she doesn't like inside it, having her cousin killed near the Wildfire, killing Tyene Sand with the same poison that Tyene used on Myrcella and forcing Ellaria to watch, then capturing the nun who was her jailer and [[Grimdark|leaving her to be tortured to death by zombie Gregor Clegane]]. She is in short [[Thanquol]] disguised as a beautiful blonde woman. Gets anticlimactically squashed by a collapsing ceiling along with Jaime during Daenerys's assault on King's Landing. (her biggest issue? Not dying sooner, for the Seven's sake!)
* Jaime Lannister, ''The Kingslayer'': Younger twin brother (by about three seconds) to Cersei Lannister and commander of the Kingsguard. He loves his sister in every sense of the word and had three children with her. Killed the last king despite his oath, and is widely hated for it, even though everyone agrees that dying was a massive improvement for Aerys. The reason for this betrayal was that Aerys had a huge stockpile of Acme Brand Magic Napalm stockpiled under the city, ready to be set off the moment a siege broke through the town walls, and Jaime's options were to let it happen or kill Aerys before the crazy fuck got ''everybody'' killed. His desire to openly love his sister and win the respect he feels he deserves eventually causes Cersei to reject him. Starts off as an arrogant douche who [[Grimdark|tried to murder Bran Stark, but accidentally crippled him instead]]; as the series progressed he became progressively more bro-tier besides the whole wants-to-fuck-his-sister thing, though he eventually begins to question even this devotion after seeing what a bitch she is when she comes to power. He genuinely loves Tyrion, so much so that he actually went off on his own to get him back after he heard Catelyn had him imprisoned in the Vale. He gets freed by Robb and goes on a journey through Westeros, loses his arm, and gets a lesson in valour and knighthood from Brienne of Tarth. He starts to question his legacy after his son Joffrey makes him Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, a position that was only made available because Joff expelled the Knight who had actually earned it. Since Joff and Cersei had filled the Kingsguard with sycophants and their own thugs, Jaime's role as the Lord Commander has left a bad taste in his mouth because he is now the leader of probably the least prestigious iteration of the Kingsguard ever. Basically, [[Sigvald|Sigvald the Magnificent]] currently in the midst of a redemption arc. In the books, he is currently being lured into a trap by Lady Stoneheart.
**In the show, he has finally told Cersei to get fucked after realizing that she has well and truly lost it, and rode north to help fight the White Walkers. He survived the Battle of Winterfell, hooked up with Brienne, and then rides south [[Derp|because he just can't let Cersei go.]] Winds up getting shanked by Euron Greyjoy and dies [[Fail|via collapsing ceiling]].
* Tyrion Lannister, ''Halfman'': a very intelligent dwarf who is awesome, but hated by everyone, either because of his deformity, or because he's a Lannister. The few people who treat him well is an uncle that went missing, his brother Jaime, Jon Snow who learned a lot from him, and Varys, who at first saw him as an asset, but grew to admire his political abilities and intellect, even declaring him a friend. He seems to do much better when getting drunk with whores, rogues, bastards and barbarians. His silver tongue is one of his greatest strengths (he's witty and good at persuading people) and weaknesses (he tends to think himself to be way more clever than he actually is, which mainifests in him being quick with insults and the truth in a city ruled by sociopaths and liars). Tyrion is also one of the only characters with an actual sense of the bigger picture, and an interest toward steering the world toward an outcome that ''doesn't'' involve a [[The End Times|Warhammer End Times]] scenario. **Unfortunately, the world's movers, shakers, and those who generally have the power to make a difference are increasingly either a) dead, b) scattered to the winds or c) hate his dwarf guts. Despite the increasing difficulty and fruitlessness of his task, however, [[Awesome|Tyrion still fights]]. After being framed for killing Joffrey, he killed his own father and fled Westeros. In the books, he is currently in exile in the Free Cities, weaselling his way into leading a merc band and trying to sign them up with Daenerys' forces, recognizing her as one of the few chances Westeros has got of fixing its shit (provided she can get her own shit together, which she's having a bit of trouble with).
**Since characters in this series tend to either be walking tropes, rip-offs of other fantasy characters, or historical people with different names, Tyrion is probably based on the great [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Vorkosigan Miles Vorkosigan] (who was himself based on a few people including Sir Winston Churchill) and is a nod to King Richard III (a deformed but competent king later demonized by historiographers of his era). Even if he is usually the smartest one in the room at any given time, though, Tyrion is still not above having some derp moments. Exhibit A, when Tyrion asked his father what happened to his first wife (right before killing him), he took an ''obvious'' "I don't know and I don't care" response ("Wherever whores go") as if it was literal directions, and afterward keeps asking random people if they know where whores go, with predictable reactions. (Admittedly he'd just killed his ex and was probably in the middle of some serious PTSD at the time, which is not great for your brain.) The show version eventually meets Daenerys and becomes her Hand only to [[Fail|fuck up a bunch of stuff]] and lose her trust. He sells her out when he realizes that she's gone round the bend and winds up becoming Hand to King Bran.
**Don't confuse TV Tyrion with book Tyrion. Book Tyrion is every bit as amoral and vindictive as many view him as and waaaaay more of a grey character, especially after his exile from Westeros, where he pulls off some truly despicable shit out of spite and his own self-loathing (for example, forming a genuine romantic connection with a fellow dwarf woman, then abuse the shit out of her). TV Tyrion pretty much becomes the audiences avatar from season 6 onwards. His entire character is robbed of any agency in order to make D&D look smart and give big moral lessons to Daenerys (which make no sense within the context of the show).
* Kevan Lannister: Tywin's younger brother, considered "the reliable one". One of the few decent Lannisters, though saying that he is perfectly happy carrying out Tywin's bidding. Tried to talk sense into Cersei and was later called in to try and fix her mess. He did such a good job of it that Varys decided to personally thank him. With a crossbow. And a group of knife-wielding children. In the show he dies with the rest of the crowd when the Great Sept got nuked by Cersei - the manner of his book death was given over to Grand Maester Pycelle at the exact same time.
* Lancel Lannister: Kevan's son, Tywin's nephew and Tyrion, Jamie and Cersei's cousin. A callow, spoilt but well-meaning nobleman. Pretty much Joffery but mentally stable, not sadistic and capable of compassion and honor. Enters a sexual relationship with his cousin Cersei when Jamie is captured, which Tyrion uncovers and uses to blackmail Lancel into spying for him. He later has a religious experience after nearly dying and joins the Poor Fellows of the Faith of the Seven, gives up his incestuous relationship and tries to convert several of his family members (somewhat successfully with Kevan, unsuccessfully with Cersei). Still alive in the books.
**In the show, he reports Cersei to the High Sparrow (rather than the High Sparrow cleverly uncovering Cersei's plan and trapping her) and dies horribly. Cersei deliberately set him up for a particularly agonizing and drawn-out end; he's lured into a catacomb under the sept that contains a massive cache of wildfire, gets his spinal cord severed so he can't walk, and is left where he can see candles sitting in a pool of wildfire just a little too far away for him to reach it in time, so that he [[Grimdark|spends his last moments vainly trying to avert a horrible catastrophe before being incinerated]].
* Cersei and Robert's (actually Jaime's) children:
** Joffrey Baratheon: Spoiled brat and sociopath to the extreme. He's basically [[Sigvald]] during his teenage years (and likely inspired [[Phil Kelly|Kelly]] to make the character Sigvald). "Heir" of the throne, and the technical king of Westeros during the War of the Five Kings since he lives in King's Landing and sits on the throne. Turned out to be worse than Aerys. He died and there was much rejoicing. [[Fail|Except by his mother, who instead had sex on his corpse]]. Fourteen years old at the time of his death.
** Tommen Baratheon: The new king on the Iron Throne. Nine years old. Married to a teenaged shotacon wife who's (unknown to him) the granddaughter of his brother's true killer. Trying to litigate the criminalization of beets. Loves [[Cats|kittens]]. He's pretty well-rounded and non-fucked up, which is a miracle considering his parents, both putative and biological. Also seems to be trying to take kinging seriously, but his mom is trying to quash that in her subliminal attempt to hold power indefinitely, so whether it holds is another matter entirely. Prophesied to die before Cersei, which is doubly tragic due to his age and being a much better person than her.
**In the show, he commits suicide after Cersei blows up the Great Sept (head office of the fantasy knockoff Church of England), killing his godfather, great-uncle, wife, and all his religious friends, because of course her power hunger was more important than his happiness and well being.
** Myrcella Baratheon: Princess, and Cersei and "Robert's" second oldest child. Ten years old. In order to appease the Martells, Tyrion arranges a marriage with her and the youngest Martell, which pissed off everyone. In the books, she had her face fucked up because of Arianne Martell's amateur intrigues, which overlapped with poor planning, general stupidity, and another guy's backstabbing. Before the maiming, she was quite decent and non-evil. Who knows how she'll turn out now with half of her face cut off. Also prophesied to die before Cersei.
**In the show, she had a crush on Oberyn's surviving nephew but was killed by Elia in revenge for Oberyn's death, but alive in the books though missing an ear. Also, the readership all got on George's balls for maiming this girl, mostly because it was a sign that he had run out of ideas and was basically just milking Diabolus ex Machina ([[Just As Planned|or that's what he wants us to think]]).
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===House Baratheon===

''"Ours is the Fury"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Ascended to the Iron Throne after a successful rebellion against the Mad King Aerys II Targaryen. Produces no less than three claimants to the succession, each one very different from the other. Technically a cadet branch of House Targaryen as their founder Orys was allegedly a Targaryen bastard, who took the original Storm Kings (House Durrandon) deer sigil after killing the last one and fucking his only child Argella and then 200 odd years later, King Egg's daughter married their grandfather. They're pretty much the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Plantagenet House of Plantagenet].
* Robert Baratheon, ''The Usurper'': Fat, old, former badass who led the rebellion, and now the king who married Cersei Lannister. Then he fucked a bunch of other women and had lots of illegitimate kids. He was killed while mixing boar hunting and drinking, but whether this death was planned or not is uncertain. On the surface, a king with a thing for easy laughs and partying; right underneath the surface, he's irresponsible and leaves the actual ruling of a nation to his staff, deeper under the surface he's pretty much a sad, lonely old bro who would rather not have been king. Comparable to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_IV_of_England Henry IV], in that both were powerfully built military geniuses who overthrew the existing monarchy and later succumbed to an unhealthy lifestyle.
* Stannis '''The Mannis''' Baratheon: Robert's younger brother, an all-around badass who swings between [[Lawful Stupid]] (more so in the show than the books) and [[gets shit done|getting shit done]]. [[Judge Dredd|believes so strongly in the rule of law]] that he feels compelled to take the Iron Throne for himself despite wanting nothing to do with it. Is advised by a priestess of the God of light, Melisandre, and a lowborn smuggler named Davos Seaworth raised to knighthood and nobility. [[C.S Goto|His character is ruined in the show into an incompetent pawn of Melisandre and gets killed off just because one of the showrunners didn't like him]].
** Shireen Baratheon: Stannis's kid daughter. The sweet, charming, and intelligent little lady who was left with a deformity on her face from a disease called greyscale. Teaches Davos how to read, and is probably the most innocent person in the series alongside Tommen, Myrcella and a few others. Being the grim and dark universe A Song of Ice and Fire is, however, this means that she's likely going to end up becoming fuel for a vicious fire god. In the show she does, but in the books, she is safe and sound since Stannis isn't stupid enough to bring him with her while campaigning. His wife, on the other hand, being such an idiotic fanatical pyromaniac... well, her odds aren't exactly looking that great.
* Renly Baratheon, ''That Gay Guy'': Robert and Stannis's youngest brother. Took Loras Tyrell (a.k.a. Knight of Flowers, Pretty Boy, etc.) as his lover. Decided he was better suited to be king, though the bizarre and outdated laws of the land stated Stannis was next in line (though Joffrey and then Tommen were first since they were [[Pretend|officially]] Bobby B's legitimate kids). Was hugely popular since he had Robert's charisma, which led to him getting the most support, but he lacked Stannis's conviction and devotion to the duty of actually doing the work of a king, or even Robert's ability to wage war. Killed by Melisandre with some "help" by Stannis ''The Mannis'' for trying to steal his crown, though in the books Stannis may not have been completely aware of the role he played in Renly's death. He's basically [[That Guy]] of ASOIAF, since quite a lot of shit is his fault, indirectly or otherwise.
*Gendry Baratheon, the Bastard Son. One of Robert's many, many bastard children, and the one who gets the most page and screen time. He starts out as a humble blacksmith in King's Landing, who first comes to Ned's attention when Lord Stark is investigating the death of Jon Arryn. From there, he gets shipped off to the Night's Watch to avoid the imminent purge of Robert's bastards and winds up becoming friends with Arya and Hot Pie. After some adventuring and sexual tension with Arya (at least in the show), he joins the Brotherhood Without Banners. In the show, they sell him to Melisandre so she can use him for a blood magic ritual, while in the books he just goes on being a smith and doesn't get involved in anything particularly weird or shady. He's helping run an inn as a Brotherhood front/orphanage when he reappears in the books, but in the show, Ser Davos sets him free and tells him to fuck off, which he does for a few seasons. He eventually turns up back in King's Landing, where Davos finds him and recruits him (and his comically oversized LARPing hammer) for Team Snow. He helps Jon capture a wight to show Cersei, makes dragonglass weapons for the Army of the Living, hooks up with Arya, and fights in the Battle of Winterfell, after which Daenerys legitimizes him as the new lord of House Baratheon.</div></div>

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===House Tully===

''"Family, Duty, Honor"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> Lords of the central riverlands. Being the obligatory central nation they spend a lot of the series being fought over like a cake in between fat kids. Basically Poland/the Netherlands, given they have so many rivers and how hard they've been fucked over.
*Edmure Tully: Basically the SoIaF universe's eternal butt monkey (because he happens to be a decent fucking person). Despite being an okay guy, he's also a useless ponce with a dense streak a mile wide and a bad habit of bragging about things he shouldn't be proud of. It took hanging in a stockade for a few months to make him experience some growth. When Jaime was brought in to unfuck the situation and end the siege at Riverrun, Jaime's "negotiation" pressured him into convincing his house to surrender, but he made sure [[Troll|that Brynden got out first]]. In the books, he's currently spending his days at the Lannister house as a hostage to make sure that the Tullys don't try to ruin the situation again.
**In the show, he disappears until the final episode, [[Fail|where he tries to make a case for himself as king]] only to get shut down by Sansa.
*Lord Hoster Tully: In GoT the only act he committed of any note was to die. In the books however he is arguably, though inadvertently, the most destructive character once you've delved into his history. The man looked down upon peasants, cripples, bastards, and broken things, which influenced his daughters and primed them for their mistreatment of such through their travels (especially Catelyn's immediate suspicion of Tyrion, [[What|despite the charge and evidence making little sense, but because he's a "Monster" of course he must have done it]]). He denied Tywin's offer to marry Tyrion to Lysa for said reasons, but he also denied Lysa to marry Petyr because of his low birth and her value of being married off to a higher bidder, even if their age differed by at least 50 years and she was pregnant with Petyr's child. He responded to this pregnancy by forcefully aborting the child via drinking Moon Tea, without her knowledge (something he would have nightmares about approaching his death). Not only did this nearly cause her death, but it destroyed her reproductive system resulting in 5 miscarriages and 2 stillbirths (an event that would lead her to aggressive paranoia so fervent that she killed her husband to prevent being separated from her only living child). All of these actions unfortunately spiraled into helping cause The War of the Five Kings.
*Brynden Tully ''the Blackfish'': He didn't catch the memo that he was part of the joke faction, and proceeds to spend the entire series fucking Lannister shit up and generally being a boss. Thought to be the black sheep in a family of fish (Thus "Blackfish", geddit?), but in spite of that status held true to the family, continuing to hold Riverrun for Robb in spite of the war pretty much being lost. When Edmure surrendered Riverrun, he escaped by swimming under the portcullis and escaping into the river, causing everyone to shit themselves because he's totally coming for revenge. Also widely accepted by the fans to be a closeted homosexual.
**In the HBO show, he gets killed when resisting arrest from Tully forces by order of Edmure. [[Rage|And it happens offscreen.]]</div></div>

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===House Arryn===

''"As High as Honor"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Mountain lords turned [[NEET|neurotic shut ins]]. Goes through lords about as quickly as you would expect a castle equipped with a door that opens into empty air. Basically Switzerland/Afghanistan, seeing as how they stayed neutral in the War of Five Kings, their land is covered by nothing but mountains, and they're constantly fighting with the local tribes. They were being entertainingly screwed over by Littlefinger until his death.
*Jon Arryn: Only appears posthumously and is the catalyst for the whole plot. Used to be a foster father of sorts to Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark. Was the Robert's Malcador the Sigilite during Robert's Rebellion. He was killed by Littlefinger via Lysa when he figured out that Robert's kids are bastards of Cersei and Jaime. His death was blamed on the Lannisters to destabilize Westeros.
*Lysa Arryn: Loli bride turned Lady of the Vale after the Lannisters forcibly retired her husband from life, at least officially. In reality, Littlefinger convinced her to poison her husband and blame the Lannisters [[Just As Planned|which pretty much started this whole clusterfuck to begin with]]. A closeted, crazy woman who spends the entire series in her castle "the Eyrie" being useless, breastfeeding her own son at age 10, obsessing over Littlefinger's cock, and [[Derp|refusing to help her sister and nephew in the war she and Littlefinger pretty much started]], which may have guaranteed their eventual horrific murders by their enemies. Finally gets her comeuppance when Littlefinger kicks her out the moon door (post-taunting, of course), putting her out of our collective misery. Long live the Lord Protector.
* Robert Arryn: ''Littlefuck'', Lysa's equally mentally unstable autistic son, who still sucks on his mom's tit and enjoys seeing people "fly" out the moon door to their deaths. He actually seems to be a bit smarter than you would first think and is a really, really good judge of character, except with Sansa. Secretly being poisoned by Littlefinger and Sansa so she can take over the Vale and North. Named Robin in the show because the showrunners were afraid that having two characters with the same name would be too confusing. The show version doesn't get poisoned but turns up in the series finale as the Lord of the Vale.</div></div>

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===House Greyjoy===

''"We Do Not Sow"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">[[Awesome|A house founded by Cthulhu-worshipping Norscans]]. While not actual Vikings in any sense of the word, there is little other way to describe them. They live on some islands off the coast of Westeros and almost their entire culture is based around raiding and the ocean. Their religion holds it shameful for a man to pay for personal possessions, and states they have to get things either by trade, washing up from the ocean or the "Iron Price": seizing something from the body or belongings of someone he defeated in battle rather than paying or trading for it. Also, only possessions acquired via the Iron Price command respect among the Ironborn. The nastiest form this takes is stealing women as "Salt Wives", [[Emperor's Children|effectively making them a society of rapists]]. As an interesting bit of trivia, their local variety of baptism is to be ritually drowned in seawater and resuscitated by their priests, and they don't see drowning as a bad way to go on the grounds that it means their god/gods have accepted them and they'll go to an underwater Heaven that's basically a more X-rated version of The Little Mermaid.
*Balon Greyjoy: Asshole dad, crappy ruler, and general shithead (all very common things in this world, but still) who rebelled against Robert Baratheon and failed miserably. All of his sons were killed, except for Theon, who was taken as a hostage to ensure his good behaviour. Despite being in a position to join either the Lannisters or the Starks during the War of Five Kings and thereby get whatever he wanted from either (independence and the North, or independence and Casterly Rock, respectively), he does the absolute stupidest thing possible and declares himself independent without support from anyone, attacking the North and the rest of Westeros, thereby virtually guaranteeing that he'll be on the receiving end of another one-sided battle once everyone else has sorted their shit out. In the book he at least tried to make one alliance but it was with the freaking Lannisters and not the other Kingdom seeking independence. Never got that far, though, since he was pushed off a bridge during a storm by an assassin his brother Euron sent.
*Victarion Greyjoy: Admiral of the Iron Fleet. [[Gets shit done]] while wearing [[Dark Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|Lokhir Fellheart's]] armour during boarding actions. Does it for vengeance, the lulz and as a ticket to Ironborn heaven (which they believe men can reach if they die in battle or by drowning). Worships both R'hllor and the Drowned God. For all his badassery, is far too stupid to realize that his black Red Priest sidekick's constant rambling about his "great destiny" is inevitably going to end in his burning to death on a sacrificial pyre. Said Red Priest impressed Victarion by surviving being marooned at sea for 3 weeks and turning Victarion's infected arm into a super-strong volcano arm. Seriously. Isn't in the show, which is lame.
*Aeron Greyjoy ''Damphair'': [[Kostaltyn|A priestly Alan Moore who drank seawater]]. Once a fun-loving party animal, he nearly drowned during the Greyjoy Rebellion and became a dour and devout priest of the Ironborn [[Cthulhu]] religion. Confirmed to have been raped by Euron when they were kids. Planned to overthrow Euron, who bribed and manipulated his way into becoming king of the Ironborn. As of the excerpts from the sixth book, he [[Grimdark|Was captured by Euron and tortured to try and make him renounce his faith, including feeding him spoiled food, drugging him and burning him. Later Euron tied Aeron, naked, to the prow of Euron's ship alongside Euron's tortured, pregnant former lover because she showed Aeron kindness by once giving him proper food]]. He tried to console her by saying their suffering will end in underwater Valhalla, [[Awesome|showing Euron failed to make him deny his faith]]. Also left out of the show.
*Theon Greyjoy: Son of the Lord/King of the Iron Islands. Had the personality of a stereotypical high school jock, being an excellent archer and womanizer and proud of it. He was given to Ned Stark by his father after Balon failed to successfully rebel against Robert Baratheon. Swore an oath to Robb, but then ditched him out of a desperate need to please his father. Ends up castrated and acts as the personal slave of Ramsay Bolton after Ramsay puts him through horrific torture to turn him into Reek. Rescued by his sister, but the psychological trauma meant it took a while before he could stop calling himself Reek and start getting back to normal mentally (physically he's now missing a few parts that don't heal or grow back). He's just been reunited with his sister in the books, but is dead in the show, thanks to charging the Night King by himself while protecting Bran.
* Asha Greyjoy: Theon's older sister and a commander of some renown which is quite a feat - almost every man on the Iron Islands except her father either tried to get in her pants or told her to [[-4 STR|stop playing around and go do some actual women's work]], before she kicked enough ass that they respected her. Rescues Theon after he escapes Ramsay but then loses him to Stannis. Is named Yara in the show because the showrunners thought her name sounded too similar to Osha the wildling chick and is also apparently [[PROMOTIONS|bisexual]]. Eventually becomes Lady of the Iron Islands in the show because she's the last Greyjoy standing. Kind of a Han-Solo-Stand-in character-wise, being a brash, aggressive pirate queen that acts very opportunistically, but underneath her badassery she has a soft heart for people she cares about (mostly Theon and her crew) and a strong sense of justice.
*Euron Greyjoy ''Crow's Eye'': A [[Chaos Warrior|sick fuck Lovecraftian pirate armed with unnatural sorcerous powers]] and so evil that Balon banished him from the Iron Islands. Every member of his crew is a mute because Euron ripped all their tongues out. Many of them are also the illegitimate sons [[Beastmen|of women he's raped around the world during his raids]]. Uses an eyepatch to conceal a pitch-black eye, his personal "obviously a villain" mark. Raped his brother Victarion's wife, then claimed she wanted it so Victarion had to kill her. Raped his younger brother Aeron. Also showed back up in the Iron Islands the day after Balon died, despite having been raping and pillaging in Essos before that, which is suspicious as fuck. Now the new Iron King. Plans to conquer Westeros and has some unknown plan to deal with Daenerys. Revealed in the book ''Winds of Winter'' to be [[Erebus|one of the sickest fucks in an entire setting of sick fucks (and that's saying something)]], including having a god complex while hating religion so much he [[Grimdark|tortures any clergymen he captures to try and make them give up their faiths using ironic tortures themed around their religions - such as preachers have their tongues cut out and burning priests of the fire god to death]]. Euron tried and failed to break his priest brother Aeron's faith so he lashed Aeron to the front of his ship to die [[Grimdark|alongside Euron's own pregnant lover Falia]], in what could be preparations for the [[Betrayal at Calth|ruinstorm]].
**In the show he's just a psycho pirate turned king without any magic powers or gear [[FAIL|who wants to bang Cersei. Jaime kills him in the second-to-last episode in one of the dumbest moments in an already terrible episode.]]
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===House Tyrell===

''"Growing Strong"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Lords of Highgarden and the Reach, backstabbers par-excellence, and owners of a lot of fertile lanf. Of the Seven Kingdoms, the Reach is the "biggest," having the most people, the largest army, and a stable agrarian economy; yes, the Westerlands is richer, yes, the Stormlands have/had the strongest military, and yes, the Vale is the most honor-and-chivalry obsessed, but the Reach and the Tyrells are the only ones who can compete with all three at once. Unlike the current lot of Lannisters they understand the value of good PR, balancing ruthlessness with being somewhat amicable to the commoners, politically savvy and not being stuck-up on honour (which they still have more of than the Lannisters do). They're a bit analogous to France. In the books, it's the Tyrells and their support that keeps the throne afloat post-Robert, first aiding Joffrey and then Tommen. They were "shrewd" enough to stay out of Robert's Rebellion and outside of his court while Tywin was in charge, so their lands are basically untouched by war: the Reach's cities are also the most beautiful, with Highgarden and Oldtown being notable for not smelling like shit and full of garbage. [[Fail|Unfortunately, they've all been wiped out in the show]].

*Mace "The Ace" Tyrell: Lord of Highgarden. Massively fat and overweight, while being stupid, overreaching and constantly mocked by everyone else, he's otherwise known as a friendly man, a good Lord when it comes to management and a good father; in the books, the Iron Throne uses him to print gold and alleviate hunger during the War of the Five Kings, so they give him and his family a bunch of positions to keep them invested. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to save a man in the Game of Thrones. In the books, he's just been named Hand of the King as part of Kevan Lannister's plan to keep his house on-side. In the show he gets killed with the rest of the noble houses when Cersei blows up the Great Sept of Baelor.
*Olenna Tyrell: The brains behind House Tyrell's schemes. Known as the ''Queen of Thorns'' for being an outspoken, prickly and venomous old lady. Schemed with Littlefinger to have Joffrey killed, but she carried it out with compressed powder "gems" hidden in Sansa's hairnet that poisoned his wine. She is to the Tyrells as Tywin is to the Lannisters, except her daughter isn't a narcissistic sociopath.
**Alive and well in the books (so far), where she's pretty much the same as the show. She has chosen Margaery as her successor, which is why she made sure she'd be engaged to Tommen and had Joffrey offed.
**Became a fan-favorite for constantly dropping awesome one-liners and calling out smug and/or unpopular characters like Littlefinger and the Sand Snakes. [[Fail|Killed off in the show]] as Jaime gives her the option of drinking painless poison or whatever Cersei wanted to do to her after his forces capture Highgarden. Olenna took the poison, and before she died [[Awesome|revealed to Jaime that she was the one who killed Joffrey and told him to make sure Cersei knows it]].
*Willas Tyrell: Mace Tyrell's eldest son and heir, crippled at a very young age when jousting against Oberyn Martell. Surprisingly, he and Oberyn are still bros, even though the rest of their Houses aren't very fond of each other because of this incident. Probably one of the most pleasant and sensible characters in the books, which might explain why they never included him in the TV show. Very fond of breeding animals, especially horses.
*Garlan Tyrell ''The Gallant'': Second-born son. Badass extraordinaire, considered one of the best swordsmen in Westeros, and one of the few people who's kind to Tyrion. Trains for real combat (often against multiple opponents by himself) unlike Loras, who's a tourney fighter. Single-handedly wrecks many notable knights fighting for Stannis during the War of The Five Kings. And he is the only person other than Tywin to put Joffrey in his place, at his own wedding. Sadly no POV chapter yet and omitted from the TV series (Loras takes credit for his deeds).
*Loras Tyrell ''The Knight of Flowers'': The Tyrell who appears most in the TV series, since his older brothers got adapted out. Considered to be an example of the perfect knight, despite his youth. Is secretly Renly's gay lover and conspired to take the throne with him and his sister. He was elevated to the Kingsguard as part of the Lannisters' appeasement of the Tyrells, but also to ensure that Margaery would be safe if it turned out they couldn't kill Joff/Tommen turned out to be a sociopath too. Last seen badly injured in the books attempting to take Stannis' castle in order to to prove his honor after the Faith Militant locked up his sister, but because none of Cersei's sources could visually confirm it, it's likely that the Tyrells ([[Iron warriors|it was ''their'' forces that did the sieging]], after all) fabricated a story to get their boy out of there. In the show he ends up tortured by the members of the Faith for being gay [[C.S Goto|because the showrunners retconned them to hate gay people]], [[Protectorate of Menoth|later joins their ranks of questionable willingness]], then dies when Cersei blows up the Sept of Baelor.
*Margaery Tyrell: The would-be Queen of Westeros, she has married, in order, Renly Baratheon (gay), Joffrey Baratheon (evil), and Tommen Baratheon (8 years old) and has been crowned as queen three times. While she is nice, like Disney Princess-in-a-grimdark-setting-nice, she is still her grandmother's protege, and so is the source of Cersei's paranoia (which is kinda valid as the Tyrells did off Joffrey so that Margy could marry the more-controllable and non-sociopathic Tommen). Cersei was so paranoid about Marge's ascension that she decided to legitimize the Sparrows and allow them to reform the [[Age of Apostasy|Faith Militant]], all because she was afraid Tommen would listen to Margaery more than her.
**In the show, she marries and uses sex to control Tommen, because the show needed to hit its titty quota and because Tommen is a teenager in the show. Was arrested by the resident Chamber Militant, the Sparrows, and asked for a trial by faith in the books. In the show, this also happens but she tries to be pious in an attempt to save herself but ends up getting killed when Cersei blows up the Sept of Baelor.
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===House Martell===

''"Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken"''
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[[Tallarn|Desert dwelling survivalists]] who [[Dune|pride themselves on having never been conquered]] by the Targaryen dynasty (though they later married in). Moorish Spaniards, kinda. Their entire thing is that they're nothing like the rest of the Seven Kingdoms: they're descended from the Rhoynar, a group of people that used to live along one of Essos' longest rivers who practice absolute cognatic (the oldest child, regardless of gender, inherits the throne) succession and take a very liberal attitude towards sex. House Martell also has a rocky relationship with the rest of the kingdom: The Baratheons don't trust them because they were all Targaryen loyalists, the Reach doesn't like them because of historic wars between the two, and House Martell has never forgiven House Lannister for Clegane's rape and murder of Elia Martell, Rhaegar's first wife and mother of his children.
[[C.S Goto|Their story arc was completely ruined in the show, as Elia and Oberyn's daughters kill Oberyn's brother and nephew for taking too long to avenge him before being captured and killed themselves by Euron and Cersei]].
*Doran Martell: Lord of Sunspear and of royal descent. Still mad at the Lannisters about that whole "murdered-my-sister-and-infant-niece thing". Playing the longest of long games with Varys, which blew up in his face because he told ''no one in his family'' about his schemes (well, maybe Oberyn, but Oberyn is dead).
**[[What|Killed off in the show by Ellaria as part of her plan to avenge Oberyn]]. Even his actor was upset.
*Arianne Martell: One of GRRM's characters who seems to exists solely to fuck everything up at the worst conceivable moment. Still hot as Dornish girls come. See, she is technically the heir of Dorne, being the ''first-born'' daughter, and yet was shut out of most of her father's meetings and plans, which caused her to get upset because even Oberyn treats all of his bastards better than her dad treats her. After Doran ''seemingly'' accepts his own brother's death without any sort of fuss, she decides that her father is weak and plans to start ''another'' front in the War of Five Kings by putting Myrcella up on the throne. However, one of her dad's spies gives them up, and in a huge clusterfuck, Myrcella gets maimed by one of the pro-war knights. She is then taken to her father, who finally spills the beans on his grand scheme: the reason why she was sidelined by her father was because he had secretly betrothed her to her Viserys, but now that Viserys is dead, plans to see if he can broker an alliance with "Aegon," Rhaegar and Elia's son who "supposedly" was secreted away and replaced with doubles.
*Oberyn Martell ''The Viper of Dorne'': Doran Martell's brother, a bisexual swinger, former mercenary, and a drunkard (and also Inigo Montoya in Dark Fantasy). His girlfriend is a spectacularly beautiful bastard named Ellaria Sand and he has many illegitimate children, mostly daughters, collectively called "The Sand Snakes". Crippled the Tyrell heir in a joust, causing a rift between the two houses; despite this, he's actually best mates with the aforementioned heir, due to Willas Tyrell being straight up the nicest and most balanced man in the series and Oberyn being a very decent person. Known for poisoning his weapons, as well as his battle-cry. Died from a mutual kill, with Gregor Clegane crushing his skull in rather graphically, but Oberyn getting the last laugh, since he got Clegane with a horribly painful and slow-acting venom which stretched his death over days or even weeks, during which time he was ruthlessly experimented upon by a mad scientist, meaning he avenged his sister Elia who Gregor had raped and murdered. [[Sanguinius|So to sum it up, he's a spear-wielding badass whose death in battle against a major villain was deeply traumatizing for all in-universe and out]].

*Quentyn Martell: Didn't realize he was in Dark Low Fantasy and thought he was in High Fantasy, poor bastard. A member of House Martell, sent to marry Daenerys to secure an alliance between the families since the original marriage plan to hook Arianne up with Viserys won't work with Viserys dead. Leaves Westeros and goes all the way to the city of Meereen to marry her, but he's too late, as she marries the Meereenese noble Hizdahr, and like Jorah he's not her type (Dany likes her bad boys). Tries to tame two of her dragons to impress her; the attempt goes wrong, he gets horribly burnt and gradually dies in agony from his wounds.
*The Sand Snakes: Oberyn's children. All daughters he had with various women throughout his travels (all consensual encounters, mind you, which actually says a lot about Westeros that it has to be said). Mixed race and all hot with various skills including combat training and mastery of poisons. Working with Doran and Ellaria in the books.
**[[C.S Goto|Ruined in the show where they don't accomplish anything, are given atrocious dialogue (the "you need the bad pussy" line comes to mind), aren't great fighters and get killed by Euron's men, except for the one who poisoned Myrcella; she gets captured and poisoned back by Cersei so an imprisoned Ellaria is forced to watch her die and decompose.]]</div></div>

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===House Bolton===

''"Our Blades Are Sharp"''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The Starks' most important (and most despised) vassal, a former arch-rival made of [[Grimdark]] because their entire theme [[Dark Eldar|revolves around Torture]] and they're [[Night Lords|thoroughly awful, dishonorable, sadistic cowards who can be counted on to do every dirty trick possible before even trying to fight fair. Their sigil is a crucified and flayed man]], their castle is [[Commorragh|a complex of constant suffering called the Dreadfort]], and just look at their House motto...all of which shows how stupid the Starks were for thinking they could control them. Tied with Red Wedding collaborators the Freys as the most thoroughly vile house in the entire setting (no mean feat, all things considered).
*Roose Bolton, ''The 'Leech Lord'': A Lawful Evil sociopathic health nut who's called the Leech Lord because he gets leeched regularly, believing they get rid of bad blood. Second-most powerful Lord in the North with ambitions to depose the Starks. Since the Starks are mostly unable to think like crafty people and are blinded by excessive honour this doesn't prove too difficult. He gets his wish when he stabs Robb Stark in the back, at his uncle's wedding no less, and has anyone associated with Robb killed. He then makes over Winterfell in his bloody image and is currently trolling Stannis. Believes in the abolished practice of "[[Rape|Droit du seigneur]]" (a tradition that allowed a lord to have sex with subordinate women, whether they wanted to or not) and killed at least one man for trying to hide his wife from Roose (before fathering Ramsay with her via rape). Believed that he and his son could be as evil as they wanted as long as no one found out. Killed by Ramsey in the show, which Ramsay tried to cover with a lie despite the witnesses to his actions. May also be dead in the books, since the letter Jon receives from Winterfell in book five is addressed from Lord Ramsay Bolton.
*Ramsay Snow/Bolton: <s>A Dark Elf with shaved ears in the wrong universe</s>. <s>The Joker of Westeros</s>. The Chaotic Evil incarnate bastard son of Roose Bolton and a peasant woman he raped [[Grimdark|(under the hanging corpse of the woman's husband, for fuck's sake!)]]. One of the most fucked up people in all of the Seven Kingdoms (alongside the Mountain, Joffrey, the original Reek, the pedophile marauder Rorge and Euron), because he [[Dark Elves (Warhammer Fantasy)|loves to torture and kill people openly for the lulz]], such as Theon Greyjoy, who he crippled, knocked his teeth out, castrated, and brainwashed into calling himself Reek. Reek was originally a peasant appointed to try and control a young Ramsay, but instead Ramsay warped him into a mentally unstable necrophiliac before killing Reek to fake his death, but Ramsay seemed to hold some twisted affection for him. He also sent Theon's severed appendage to Theon's dad in a cutesy box with a letter mockingly detailing his evilness. Will torture anyone who points out his illegitimate heritage even though now he's legally recognized as a Bolton. Also has a pack of hunting dogs he names after women he hunts, rapes and kills. Married a fake Arya Stark and regularly mistreats her, including forced bestiality. Not a fun guy to be around. The only reason he's gotten away with it for so long (as pointed out by his father) is that no one is strong enough to stand up to him yet, but [[Powder Keg of Justice|when they are]] he's going to be killed (especially if his fate in the show is anything to go by).
**In the show, he killed his father with a knife, fed his stepmother and newborn half-brother to his dogs, then married Sansa Stark and deflowered her via rape. Ramsay was such a monster even Iwan Rheon, THE ACTOR WHO PLAYED THE GUY, hoped he'd die horribly. He got his wish: The consequences of Ramsay's actions catch up with him when Jon Snow shows up with an army capable of threatening him, and after surprise reinforcements from Littlefinger and his own fucked-up teamkilling, the Starks crush the Bolton army, forcing Ramsay to flee back to Winterfell. Despite this, the gate is smashed down, and Jon disarms him and beats him quite brutally before detaining him to await trial. Before the trial Sansa sets his dogs on him, which he had deliberately starved so they would eat Jon. Apparently they found him quite tasty. For all that Season 6 of GoT is Skub, there likely aren't many who would object to this moment.
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===House Frey===

''"We Stand Together"''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> House of weasels who are always grumpy and have a thing for overreacting to perceived slights. Wouldn't be that important except for the fact that they own the only bridge over a strategically important river, and regularly extort anyone attempting to cross it...that, and performing the Red Wedding, AKA the Magnum Opus of Grimdark that single-handedly ensures they're [[Marines Malevolent|the most hated fucks in the whole setting in-universe and out.]] Simply put, there is '''nothing''' good or nice you can say about the Freys. They're ugly inside and out, cruel, treacherous, thoroughly dishonorable, and aren't even strong warriors, being a mix of incompetent dumbasses and sadistic cowards. They'd all make excellent Skaven (especially considering they could stand to be killed by some Lizardmen).

*Walder Frey: The ancient, terrible, ornery old man in charge of the Twins. Universally detested by his peers (and the audience) for being an amoral, sociopathic opportunist, which he returns in kind for said peers "looking down on him" (can't imagine why), and will readily betray an important ally for immediate gain, or if he feels he has been slighted in some minor way, with the aforementioned Red Wedding being the most infamous example of both. His descendants are literally so numerous that no one except GRRM himself has been able to count them all, so we aren't even going to attempt it (not helped by quite a few of them being named Walder as well). Now dead in the show due to getting his throat slit by a vengeful Arya after she serves him two of his sons as meat pies. </div></div>

===Minor Houses and non-Houses===
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'''Night's Watch'''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">The Night's Watch are an apolitical force in charge of manning The Wall, a giant ice wall that separates the relative tranquillity of the south from the Lovecraftian fucked-up-itude of the true north. They are chronically undermanned and undersupplied since nobody believes their stories of a barbarian army or the impending zombie apocalypse. Basically everybody else thinks they're in a game of [[Diplomacy]] and the Night's Watch are the only ones who realize they're actually in [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]], though it's been so long since the last snow elf invasion that even they had forgotten about the undead hordes and focused too much on barbarians. Too add to their problems, they are overwhelmingly comprised of petty criminals who wanted to avoid the hangman, because "taking the black", as it's colloquially known, also brings with it a full pardon for any crime committed, even murder and treason (even rape, though rapists tend to be despised among the Night's Watch). Taking the black isn't also very popular, as a common joke in the Seven Kingdoms is that out 10 people, only would one would willfully take the black, the rest would rather get hanged. They also frequently serve as a convinient catch-all solution for Lords and nobles who fell out of favor, committed treason or were outwitted in the endless Westerosi wheel of politics; lucky for them because said Lords and Nobles are usually the only ones with any fighting experience that are part of the watch and make up their leadership. They've allied with the Wildings and the North, but in the TV show, the Night's King used the undead dragon Viserion to burn a hole through The Wall.
*Jeor Mormont, ''The Old Bear'': 997th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch at the start of the series. Sees Jon Snow as something of a second son (since his own son Jorah was exiled for enslaving and refused to take the black for his crimes). Leads a ranging north of the Wall to investigate reports that the Others have returned. Ends up killed during a mutiny of survivors after the Others wiped out most of his force.
*Alliser Thorne: Prick of a knight who was favourite to be the next Watch Commander, but was passed over by Jon Snow. Unable to accept Jon Snow letting the Wildlings live on the other side of the wall in an alliance against the zombie hordes, he staged a coup against Jon. It failed because Jon was brought back to life. He is now dead in the show, having been executed for his treason by Jon Snow. Despite of his many personal failings, he's one of the very few capable fighters (and a pretty good one, even) of the Watch and a skilled commander. Took the Black after siding with the Targaryens during the Sack of King's Landing in the civil war.
*Aemon Targaryen: Maester of the Citadel at Castle Black. Despite being the third born son of King Maekar I Targaryen, he declined the right to sit on the Iron Throne. One of the few people in the series to die of old age, at 102.
*Samwell Tarly, ''The Slayer'': Fat bookworm who was forced to take the black after his father Randyl threatened to murder him for being unmanly. Jon Snow's best friend among the Night's Watch, and knows everything because he "read it in a book". Despite being a self-professed coward, Sam became the first person in thousands of years to slay an Other with an obsidian dagger. George Martin himself said Sam's based on Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings. Since then, he has started improving his combat skills and balls (in more ways than one for the latter, finding his spine and losing his virginity). He abandons the Night's Watch to help fight the dead and tell Jon who he really is, and winds up becoming the new Grand Maester by the end of the show.
*Eddison Tollett, ''Dolorous Edd'': Probably the most badass member of the Night's Watch. Responds to situations by making sarcastic jokes about them, and known for being a grim motherfucker in a setting of grim motherfuckers. In the show he [[Awesome|became the new Lord Commander]] while Jon was dead, but gave the title back to Jon when he was brought back to life, and then Jon handed it right back because he needed to go sort out Ramsay Bolton. Dies in Season 8 at the Battle of Winterfell.
*Benjen Stark: The [[Dune|Duncan Idaho]] of this series, the dead guy all the other characters and all the ''readers'' love so much someone has to bring him back from the dead in later books. Benjen is Eddard Stark's youngest brother and the prime motivation why Jon wants to join the Night's Watch in the first place. Joined the Watch for reasons unknown and disappears without a trace even before Jon arrives. In the TV series, he returns as a benevolent Wight that retained his free will and helps Bran to get back to the Seven Kingdoms.
*Qhorin Half-Hand: Badass extraordinaire that killed a shitton of Wildlings in his long time of service, rumoured to have spent more time north of the Wall than anyone living southerner in the setting. Lets himself get killed by Jon in a gambit to earn Mance Rayders respect.
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'''Wildlings'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Groups of nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes who live north of the Wall. Mostly First Men by blood, they have been heading toward the Wall for the past decade with the reputed reemergence of the Others. Nomadic, aggressive, and very much believing in "might makes right", they do not get along with anyone south of The Wall since they view them as "Kneeling weaklings". Basically every Celtic/Scandinavian/barbarian stereotype combined.
*Mance Rayder, ''The King Beyond The Wall'': A Wildling orphan who was taken in by the Night's Watch, he became their best Ranger before he deserted to join his people. He united the Wildlings and lead them south to escape the Others. Also a trained bard, but that was not enough to save him from death in the show while he's merely MIA in the books.
*Tormund Giantsbane: Claims to have a ten-inch penis, and invites his enemies to use their mouths if they want to clean it. Cool as fuck old guy who [[Furry|fucks mother-bears]] in his free time. Tough as nails motherfucker who preaches the merits of using one's cock for everything. He teams up with Jon Snow for the fight against the White Walkers, then fucks off back to the north once the Night King is dead, making him one of the most sensible people on the show. He and Jon go off to be bros at the end of the show.
*Ygritte: Wildling woman who Jon Snow ends up falling for and who returns his affections. Has red hair which is considered lucky among the Wildlings. This being ''A Song of Ice and Fire'', she ends up dying because her worldview is not compatible with Jon's.
*Craster: A sick bastard, formerly a member of the Night's Watch turned polygamous isolationist. By the way, [[Grimdark|his current wives are his many daughters and granddaughters who he fucks regularly to have more children. Girls grow up to become more wives, boys get sacrificed to the Others]]. This keeps the Others at bay - and is implied to be a way the Others reproduce themselves, and that sanctuary is why the Night's Watch barely tolerates him. Fortunately, he's been killed off in the story and his offspring go their separate ways.
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'''Commoners, Knights, and Petty Lords'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Basically any character not associated with any of the Great Houses.
* Varys, ''The Spider'': The eunuch spymaster of Westeros. You can't take a shit in the Seven Kingdoms without Varys finding out where, when, and how watery or dry it was. He does this through paid informants and his "little birds", a spy network of children who sneak through the castle's passageways and air flues to eavesdrop on everyone. Somewhat of a paradoxical character, since his literal dicklessness, reputation and political power make every character extremely vary of him (it's more or less implied that the main thing keeping him in the small council is the fact that he has got enough shit on everyone to blackmail them into submission if they would dare step out of his line) but under the surface, he is the rare example of people in Westeros that isn't an entirely self-serving scumbag and seems to show genuine care and concern for the common folk [[Just as planned|(Even if his machinations frequently put commonors in peril, but hey, such is politics)]]. To that end, he manipulated events that, according to his plan, would end with a Targaryen on the throne, to permanently stabilize the realm and rid it of the aformentioned self-serving idiots. On a sidenote, he's one of the few, if not the only person to fully comprehend how dangerous Littlefinger actually is. In the books, he's currently trying to install an adolescent Targaryen on the Iron Throne (who probably isn't even one, but he got the looks) Dead in the show, having decided to try and put Jon on the throne instead of Daenerys; Jon says no, Tyrion sells him out when he realizes Jon absolutely means it, and Dany has Drogon barbecue him.
* Petyr Baelish, ''Littlefinger'': The Master of Coin (the ASOIAF equivalent of a treasurer) and the closest person the Game of Thrones world has to a [[Daemon Prince]] of [[Tzeentch]], up to even declaring "[[Chaos]] is a Ladder". A dangerous manipulator who manages to trick and steal his way to positions of lordship and wealth because no one takes him seriously, and stabs all the Lannisters in the back when they become inconvenient. As a child, he wanted Catelyn Stark and was tricked into thinking she wanted him when her sister Lysa fucked him while he was drunk. Challenged Catelyn's betrothed Brandon Stark, Ned's older brother who was murdered by Aerys, for her hand in marriage and got his ass kicked because he was a small skinny boy and Brandon Stark was a big strapping man, making that his start of darkness. The guy responsible, directly or indirectly, for the War of the Five Kings because he was the mastermind behind poisoning Jon Arryn, the capture and execution of Ned Stark, feeding several half-truths to Catelyn to motivate her to arrest Tyrion, and eventually Joffrey's death by having Dontos and Olenna Tyrell carry out the plan to kill Joffrey and letting Tyrion take the fall; but no one in the story knows this, not even Varys. People think he can pull gold out of thin air, but he's really been buying debt while letting Robert Baratheon's extravagances and Joffrey and Cersei's dipshittery pull the country into a serious debt of its own. So he's pledged himself to [[Chaos]] and destroying Westeros all because he couldn't have Catelyn as his girlfriend, though he changed his focus to her daughter Sansa now, making him a pedophile. Hasn't yet got his comeuppance in the books, but is currently dead in the show after he was out-gambitted by Sansa and killed by Arya (though the less said about how well executed this was, the better). According to GRRM, he's based on the title character from the Great Gatsby, even though he only really resembles the character when putting on an act. [[Erebus|Basically has the role of a treacherous figure who gives bad advice on purpose and is responsible for the series of events that lead to a massive, devastating war with horrible consequences, making him one of the vilest folks in the 'verse]].
*Gregor Clegane, ''The Mountain'': A 7' 8" 400 pound mass of testosterone, muscles, steroid overdose, [[Slaanesh|utter disregard for consent]], [[Khorne|and murderous RAGE]], Gregor is Tywin Lannister's top muscle. Killed his own father and sister and permanently scarred his brother. [[Beastmen|Hobbies include rape, arson, murder, and random torture]]; he's also been married a few times but not now with the implication he kept killing his wives. He played an important part in destroying the Targaryens by killing a couple of Rhaegar's kids in rather brutal fashion, then raping and murdering his wife. Spends a few novels doing Tywin's dirty work before a Trial by Champion leads to him dying after being poisoned by Oberyn Martell. Qyburn later resurrected him as... something... called "Ser Robert Strong", and is now even stronger, less prone to psychotic rages, and is completely obedient. He's based on accounts of French knight Gilles de Rais and maybe also the scriptural giant Goliath. In the show he goes on to torture Cersei's nun jailer to death in a brutal and unspecified fashion kills Qyburn during the Siege of King's Landing and then nearly kills his little brother, only for Sandor to tackle him through a collapsing wall and into a gigantic inferno that claims both. [[Honsou|Standing out as one of ''the'' evilest pieces of shit in a world filled with them]], to the point that even the author himself has labeled him the worst character in the series.
* Sandor Clegane, ''The Hound'': Younger brother to Gregor Clegane, called the Hound because of his hound-face helm, his family's heraldry, and being the king's hired muscle without being a knight. He hates knights due to the hypocrisy of being a professional "noble warrior" but mostly since his monstrous brother is a knight, showing it's not so much of a noble promotion. Terrified of fire after Gregor put his head against a brazier for playing with one of Gregor's old toys when they were children, burning half his face, but he's still the second-strongest person in Westeros. A brutal anti-hero with a soft spot for Sansa, but a better person than his brother. After falling sick from Biter's nasty teeth, he ends up being a silent monk burying people in the Silent Isles. In the show, he joins the Brotherhood without Banners and goes north to help fuck up the White Walkers. As of Season 8, he's survived the Battle of Winterfell and is riding south with Arya to put the boots to Gregor. Dies killing his now undead brother in a pretty epic fight amidst the crumbling ruins of the Red Keep.
*Grand Maester Pycelle: A shrewd, dangerous man putting on a "harmless old man act" and a high ranking scholar from the science/medical guild the Maesters. The longest-serving member of the King's advisory staff, and is actually Tywin Lannister's biggest lackey. He convinced the Mad King to let Tywin in as Baratheon's armies were marching on the capital, where Tywin proceeded to sack the city and claim it for Robert. Gets his head bashed in by Varys in the books and murdered by Qyburn in the show.
* Qyburn: Formerly a maester, who was kicked out of the order for unethical experiments on the living (taking people and performing vivisections to be precise). Introduced as a part of a mercenary company serving Roose Bolton, which should be a red flag. He moves up in the world when he's sent to escort Brienne and Jaime back to King's Landing and ends with Cersei employing him to replace Pycelle as "science advisor" and eventually Varys's Spymaster. Serves Cersei loyally as long as she lets him indulge his sick experiments, serving as a black magic variety of the court mage. He has resurrected Gregor Clegane as... something. [[Fabius Bile]] if he traded his robot limbs, eugenics and power armour for necromancy. He overestimated his hold on Gregor and got his head caved in for it as of the second-to-last episode of the show.
*Barristan Selmy, ''The Bold'': Knight of the Kingsguard. Which Kingsguard? Take your pick. He's served pretty much every king since Aerys and understandably feels pretty bad about it. Another sad old man who pretty much just wants to die until he decides to go pledge his services to Daenerys. Even in his old age, he is considered one of the most dangerous men in Westeros. [[Fail|Dead in the show]] (to be fair they gave him a huge last stand), but [[Awesome|alive]] and [[Roboute Guilliman|appointed himself Daenerys' steward in her absence to try and fix Meereen's situation in the books]].
*Melisandre, ''The Red Witch'': A priestess of R'hllor, the god of fire. Proclaimed Stannis to be the messiah-king and is doing everything in her power to make sure he wins (considerable given that she can scry, make shadow baby assassins and set things on fire with her mind). She'd be pretty bro-tier if her god wasn't so vicious. As it stands she's kind of in the grey (in the books, the show seems to zig-zag on her being evil 'cos the showrunners seem to hate religion). Most of the people she set on fire deserved it, and she hasn't ''succeeded'' in killing any babies yet. Show version now dead from suicide via rapid ageing after ensuring the Living defeat the Dead.
*Jorah Mormont: A knight and son of Jeor Mormont, exiled for trying to sell poachers into slavery and eventually joining the exiles of House Targaryen. He is offered a pardon in exchange for spying on the Targaryens but ultimately decides to stay with them after falling in love with Daenerys. Unfortunately, he gets friend-zoned hard. Despite saving her life from an assassin while she was pregnant, she still votes him off the Khalassar after learning he was a spy. He still loves her and follows her in secret, though. In the show, he goes on a quest to prove himself to her and contracts the dangerous disease Greyscale (it's like the unholy lovechild of smallpox and leprosy), but he gets cured and is now back at her side. He dies protecting her at the Battle of Winterfell.
*[[This Guy|Davos Seaworth]], ''The Onion Knight'': A former smuggler and bannerman to House Baratheon, and a top-tier hype man, pulling speeches out on the spot on several occasions to convince people to support Stannis and later Jon. One of the most Noblebright characters in the setting, which really isn't bad for a man that only just now learned how to read. During Roberts Rebellion he ran a blockade with a cargo of contraband onions to a castle Stannis Baratheon was besieged in. In exchange for the food he had, Stannis knighted Davos, [[Rules Lawyer|but Stannis's law-worshipping mindset compelled him to remove four digits from his left hand]]. Despite this, Davos has served Stannis with unquestioning loyalty, because Stannis knighting him gave his children a future. The fact that Stannis's war for the throne has ended up killing several of his sons hasn't dented his loyalty at all. **Doesn't like Melisandre because he sees her as a user and her beliefs as brutal. He's a devout follower of the Faith of the Seven in the books and the first season of the show [[C.S Goto|but is clumsily retconned into an anti-religious atheist in later show seasons]]. In the show, he's now pledged to DA NORF and is basically Jon's Hand of the King, except he doesn't get a fancy pin. He survives the Battle of Winterfell and the Second Sack of King's Landing and becomes Master of Ships in the final episode of the show.
*Shae: A former camp follower and Tyrion Lannister's squeeze for most of the story. Fled from an abusive family and became a camp follower to earn a living. Seems to fall in love with Tyrion, but it turns out she's a gold-digging bitch. When Tyrion doesn't marry Shae she sells him out to Cersei for a better offer, then fucks Tywin when she realizes Cersei won't keep her promise. Tyrion found her in his father's bed and strangled her to death with a necklace for betraying him. The discovery of Shae's corpse in Tywin's bed - posthumously outing him as a whoremonger - upsets Cersei to the point she unpersons Shae.
*Bronn: A mercenary who acts as Tyrion's enforcer and personal killer until Cersei outbids him and he settles down with a little wife and title. Routinely kills knights by exploiting how arrogant and stupid they are even after becoming one himself. Only in it for the money, which he'll happily tell you himself. The only character other than Littlefinger to end every book in a better position than he started it. In the show, he makes the very sensible decision to sit out the fighting and wait for his promised castle (Riverrun if Cersei wins, Highgarden if Daenerys wins). He gets Highgarden and is named Lord Paramount of the Reach and Master of Coin in the final episode. Some nobles bitch about the idea of an upjumped thug receiving such high and exalted positions until he points out that their Houses were probably founded by people a lot like him.
* Brienne of Tarth, ''The Beauty'': Surprisingly badass lady knight wannabe (since no women can be knighted), legendarily unattractive but still pretty idealistic despite the shit she gets for her looks. Fate frequently gives her the shit end of the stick, because no matter how hard she tries to finish her quests, she ends up failing or stuff happens that makes it impossible. Secretly crushes on Renly and unaware he's gay. After he dies, Brienne switches her loyalty to Catelyn and helps her bring Jaime to King's Landing as Tyrion promised Sansa's return in exchange for Jaime. She later developed a crush on Jaime. Things don't go well because Jaime lost his hand and the Red Wedding happened. Next, Jaime sends her out to find and keep Sansa safe to make good on Tyrion's promise, since he isn't the complete dick everyone thinks he is. Brienne ends up getting captured by Cat, now known as Lady Stoneheart and an insane undead, who was going to hang Brienne for working with Jaime. Brienne was spared at the last moment to capture/manipulate Jaime.
**In the show, she's now sworn to House Stark and gets knighted by Jaime just before the Battle of Winterfell and then she and Jaime hook up afterwards, only for him to take off and break her heart, because remember kids, he'd rather fuck his sister than fuck an ugly chick. She is now Lady Commander of the Kingsguard as of the final episode.
* Lyanna Mormont: A badass ten-year-old girl who inherits [[Kislev|Bear Island]] after her mother and older sister die horribly in the Riverlands - at least if we are going by the show; in the book, her mother is still alive somewhere [[Catachan Jungle Fighters|waging a Guerilla War]] in the Neck and her older sister Alysanne is the de-facto head of House Mormont. Her activities include pimp-slapping bitches, leading men twice as old as her, and being completely loyal to the Starks despite all their misfortunes. [[Awesome|"Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North, whose name is STARK."]] She dies killing an undead giant at the Battle of Winterfell, which is pretty badass.
* Wyman Manderly, ''Lord Too-Fat-To-Sit-A-Horse'': The Lord of White Harbour and one of the few Northerners who worship the Seven. Fervently loyal to House Stark, he pays lip-service to the Iron Throne long enough for his eldest son to return home, all to mask a plan to restore the Starks to power, mostly by destabilising the Frey-Bolton alliance, building a navy, marshalling the forces of the lands east of the White Knife river, "losing" Freys in the wilderness and sending Lord Davos Seaworth to rescue Rickon Stark from Skagos. His favourite food is lamprey, although he has also developed a taste for Frey Pie. Also a remarkably graceful dancer, and can survive taking a knife to the throat.
** Wylla Manderly: Granddaughter to the above. Another badass little girl, her activities include openly declaring undying loyalty to House Stark and dying her hair green. She and Lyanna Mormont would probably be best friends if they met. [[Awesome|"The city is built upon the land [the Starks] gave us. In return, we swore that we should always be their men. Stark men!"]]
* Jon Umber, ''The Greatjon'': At first he seems to be your stereotypical, boisterous Northern Lord. However, he becomes one of Robb's most loyal supporters, being first to declare him as 'King in the North' after Ned's execution. Had his moment of awesome [[Awesome|when he killed and wounded four Freys at the Red Wedding, all the while being drunk and needing eight additional men to take him down.]]
* Beric Dondarrion, ''The Lightning Lord'': Minor lord who agreed to head an expedition to take out Gregor Clegane. This being Game of Thrones, however, his party is ambushed by the Mountain and is beaten rather badly, and he loses his life in the process. Thanks to his drunken Red Priest friend, however, he manages to come back not once, but eight times, and each time he comes back, he becomes more powerful, though at the cost of his memory. He now heads an outlaw faction of grimdark Robin Hood types called "The Brotherhood Without Banners", who are dedicated to punishing those who abuse and mistreat the smallfolk. Ironically, he's one of the few book characters to have died (permanently) in the books but remain alive in the show, except now he's dead for real as of the Battle of Winterfell.
* Thoros of Myr: Aforementioned drunken priest who is dedicated to R'hllor, though at first he doesn't really give a rat's ass about the Red God, as he prefers to party it up with wine and women, but after he 'accidentally' resurrects Beric, he becomes quite serious about his religion and vows to curb his excesses in drinking. Dies on a mission beyond the Wall to capture a wight (show-version). Bane of swordsmiths across the lands, as he likes to routinely ignite his swords with Wildfire when he gets a hold of some of the stuff, which completely destroys the blade.
* The Brave Companions: Just when you thought there couldn't possibly be a faction in this setting as fucked up as the Boltons, Freys, and Ironborn, these guys come along and prove you wrong. A bunch of "mercenaries" who are really more just complete and utter lunatics that are incapable of doing what they're paid to in any way except the bloodiest and nastiest, all with maximum [[Rape]] thrown in too (especially if Brienne of Tarth is involved, because every single fucking one of these guys wants, tries to, or threatens to rape her at some point). Led by Vargo Hoat, a goat-helmet wearing maniac who likes cutting body parts off of his victims before killing them. The rest of his band consists of a bunch of other sickos who are every bit as bad as him (except Rorge, who is even worse). To put this into perspective, the member of the group who is a pedophile priest (Septon Utt), is the ''least'' evil one, if only because he actually regrets what he does and is suggested to do what he does because of urges he can't control. The rest? Forget about it. After Vargo's gruesome death at the hands of the even worse Gregor Clegane, the surviving Brave Companions scatter, effectively dissolving the group but meaning a bunch of these assholes are still active. Cut from the TV show completely.
** Rorge: Gregor Clegane 2.0, being ''another'' big, brutish, psychotic monster who rapes people and murders children and who is a Chaotic Evil super-thug through and through (because apparently we needed another one in the setting), with the added bit of awfulness of being a child-hating pedophile. Along with Gregor Clegane, one of the absolute worst characters in the entire series (a high bar, as you've probably gathered by now). Killed by Brienne. In the TV show, he's a completely forgettable one-shot, throwaway character who gets killed by Arya before he can really do anything and doesn't come anywhere close to the awfulness of his book version.
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'''The Free Cities'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Nine city-states to the West of Essos, for the most part, the old colonies of the Valaryian Freehold. Mostly they are ruled by Merchant Princes. They look down on the Westerosi for being a bunch of up jumped backwards war-mongering morons who are only a few silverware sets and maesters away from absolute barbarism. In turn, the Westerosi look down on the Free Cities as being money-grubbing effete cowards ruled by cheesemongers who use bribery, tall walls and dirty tricks to get ahead in the world.

* Illyrio Mopatis: A rich fat bastard and a Magister of Pentos. Old buddies with Varys and a bigtime schemer.
* [[Officio Assassinorum|The Faceless Men]]: A cult of shape-shifting assassins who worship The Many-Faced God of death based in the free city of Braavos that give up personal identity. They claim descent from escaped Valyrian slaves who considered death to be a better fate than perpetual slavery. Their mission hence became being servants of the Many-Faced God of Death. You can hire them to off your rivals, but they request a steep and equivalent price. They also offer a painless, quick suicide for downtrodden and desparate people by the means of poison. Their motto is "Valar Morghulis": All Men Must Die.
* Xaro Xhoan Daxos: One of the thirteen leaders of the city of Qarth. A flamboyant, languid, bald rich man who looks after Daenerys while she stays in Qarth and gives her many gifts. He wants her dragons as much as anyone else and even tries to marry her despite his homosexual tendencies. He stops wanting the dragons later in the book series after seeing [[RIP AND TEAR|their work in Astapor]], and no longer wants her around as her anti-slavery stance is hampering his wealth, so he offers Daenerys ships to leave the area and declares war on her when she refuses. In the show, he's heterosexual, helps steal her dragons, fucks one of her handmaidens and gets locked in a vault for conspiring to have her killed. He's also black and fat in the show when he's white and lanky in the books, being Qartheen and all.
* Syrio Forel: The former First Sword of Braavos (aka the ruler's personal bodyguard) and later Arya's mentor in King's Landing. He teaches her the way of Braavosi fencing, called "Water Dancing", and sacrifices himself to save her from Lannister thugs, taking down at least six of them with a wooden sword. May have inadvertently set her on the path of becoming a badass assassin by telling her of his belief in the God of Death.

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'''The Dothraki'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">Horse people who live in a country of endless grass plains referred to by others as the Dothraki sea. They only have one city, called Vaes Dothrak, which is less of a city and more of a place they all meet when important things have to be discussed. Have traits borrowed from several cultures, including Mongols and Native Americans, all filtered through European misconceptions of those cultures of course, such as the Dothraki's antipathy for heavy armour, despite the fact that the Mongols were very heavily armoured and also excelled as infantry, see the Battle of Leignitz. They fear the ocean because of its size and the fact that horses won't drink from it, calling it the "poison water".

* Khal Drogo: An Expy of <s>Genghis Khan</s> Yesukhei Baatyr (his son would have been the equivalent to Chinggis Khaan). Leads the largest Khalassar among the Dothraki. Despite being a barbarian warlord, Drogo is surprisingly intelligent and treats Daenerys well. After an assassin tries to kill her he promises to conquer Westeros for her and their unborn son and immediately starts raiding towns for slaves and ships. At one town he gets cut in a leadership challenge and Daenerys gets a captive wise woman to heal him. However, the woman hates him because his tribe destroyed her hometown, raped/slaughtered or enslaved her friends and raped her three times so she curses him to become catatonic (along with killing his unborn son), leading a devastated Daenerys to perform an arguable mercy kill by smothering him with a pillow. After she burns herself, her stillborn child and the wise woman on his funeral pyre, Daenerys survives and it brings her dragons to life. GRRM named Drogo after [[The Lord of the Rings|Frodo's father]].
* Daenerys' handmaidens.
** Doreah: Daenerys' handmaiden and a wedding gift from Illyrio. A woman from Lysene brought by her brother to teach her how to pleasure a man. In the book she dies of fever and starvation crossing a desert, in the TV show, she betrays Daenerys for [[Salamanders|Xaro's BBC]] and gets locked in a vault to starve to death.
** Irri: Daenerys' handmaiden who teaches Daenerys how to ride a horse. [[PROMOTIONS|Also pleasures Daenerys twice after catching her masturbating once]], yet this canonical girl-on-girl action was left out of the show. The character was even killed off there when she survived in the books, but in this case, it was because her actress' visa had expired rather than [[C.S. Goto|author railroading]].
** Jhiqui: Daenerys' handmaiden who teaches her the Dothraki language and squabbles with Irri over wanting one of Daenerys' bodyguards when he becomes a badass. Also dies in the TV show while staying alive so far in the books.

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'''Slavers Bay'''

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">A civilization of [[Stupid Evil]] slavers. The remains of a previous civilization that was once the big powerful empire thanks to having phalanxes of obedient, pain-resistant soldiers which Valyria conquered a long while ago because phalanxes don't do too well against motherfucking dragons. They are ruled by wealthy slave mongers who buy slaves, train them up to do specific things and generally are a bunch of stuck up, decadent, puppy-eating (literally) assholes. Basically a civilization so repugnant even most hippies will be cheering when Dany decides to conquer them.

* The Unsullied: Eunuch phalanx fighting slave soldiers trained the Spartan way to produce totally obedient infantry that never break ranks. They also don't feel pain due to drinking a special drink daily, and each one has to take a new name from the name box each day so they can't develop a sense of identity. At least until Dany "bought" the lot of them, had them sack the city which trained them, and freed them.
* Grey Worm: The Unsullied Commander and a no-nonsense badass. When given a chance to take a new name he keeps his slave name because it's the name he had when freed so he considers it lucky. He is completely loyal to Daenerys, considering her his saviour, and in the show, he falls in love with fellow freed-woman, Missandei. This being ASOIAF, however, he can only watch helplessly as his lover is beheaded in front of him by the Mountain. This drives him into a rage, and he eagerly takes part in the sacking of King's Landing in revenge for her death. After the war is over and both Daenerys and Cersei are dead, he takes the Unsullied forces to Naath, in order to fulfil his promise to Missandei that he'd protect her homeland.
* Strong Belwas: A fat but skilled eunuch gladiator. Loves liver and onions and referring to himself in the third person. Travelling companion/guide of Ser Barristan. Has an awesome scene where he beats the champion of Meereen then mocks the Meereenese by taking a shit in their direction and wiping his ass on their dead champion's cloak. Also saves Daenerys from eating poisoned sweets. [[FAIL|Left out of the show]].
* Daario Naharis: A Tyroshi mercenary captain who dyes his hair blue. Betrays his fellow commanders for Daenerys because he loves her as a queen. Fortunately for him, Daenerys loves him back and they pursue a romance for a time, though she doesn't marry him as she's still otherwise smart enough to know she has to save herself for a political marriage. Goes to Yunkai as a hostage in the war on Meereen. Also potentially a shapeshifter, if the show is to be believed.
*Missandei: A young female slave with a remarkable talent for linguistics and one of the more empathetic people in this dark world, Missandei is freed by Daenerys during her campaign to liberate Slaver's Bay, eventually becoming one of her closest confidants and advisers. While a child in the books, in the show Missandei is a grown woman, falls in love with the Unsullied leader Grey Worm, but later is captured by Cersei and beheaded by the zombified Mountain in front of all her friends, but not before telling her friends to burn the Lannisters to ashes.

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'''Maesters'''
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> More than Scribes, (much) less than Mentats, Maesters serve their highborn lords as intellectual muscle. Maesters serve as doctors, teachers, and scientists, and are educated at The Citadel in Oldtown. They are expected to master a variety of topics, with each topic/level of mastery grants you a chain-link forged in a different type of metal (black iron for ravenry, valyrian steel for magic), and once you hit fifteen links, you can become an ordained Maester. Because of the high costs of their education (and the fact that you need to know how to read), Maesters are often highborn, probably a non-inheriting son or bastard. It is semi-prestigious, with the nerds calling themselves "Knights of the Mind" with all seriousness (and probably with some snickering jocks in the background) but you also don't get much say where you'll be assigned (and if the castle changes hands, you go with it, but it's not unheard of for Maesters to get killed along with everyone else.

A fan theory credits the death of Dragons with the work of Maesters, because the Maesters, as men of medieval "science," have a vested interest in the decline of magic, even though they also offer a <s>bachelor's degree</s> maester's link in "higher mysteries" which they consider to be their equivalent of an english major.
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===Magic and Gods===
<div class="mw-collapsible-content"> The world of ASOIAF has various religions and faiths abound, just like in real life. Similarly, they range between fucking awesome to utterly useless. Dissimilarly, some of them have very tangible, undeniable magic powers, although it is said that the magic became stronger after the rebirth of Dragons into the world, and that in the Far East, where people worship [[Lovecraft|Lovecraft references]], that magic is still alive and well, but those are all just rumors.

Blood Magic seems to be the most consistent, with practitioners paying steep prices for magic, while the druidic magic of the Children of the Forest and the Old Gods still hold strong to this day, they just don't have any practitioners left.

Magic and the Afterlife is a theme in the setting as well, most expounded by the faithful of R'hllor: fire is associated with the warmth of life, as well as light; on the other hand, death is associated with cold and darkness; death carries a harsh finality in the series, ''except when it doesn't:'' as they've shown in special cases with those resurrected by R'hllor, rebirth comes with a price, and not everyone comes back ''fully there''.

*[[Ecclesiarchy|The Faith of the Seven]]: The Catholic Church/Church of England stand-in mixed with elements of Hinduism, which gets both sympathetic and unsympathetic characters associated with it (though mostly only in the books for the former). Holds an anti-slavery stance. The god/s are considered seven aspects of one deity with three male aspects (The Smith, the Father, the Warrior), three female aspects (The Maiden, the Mother, the Crone) and a sexless one representing Death, a bit akin to how the Hindu God Vishnu has multiple aspects. The places of worship are called Septs, and their system includes Septons, nun-equivalents called Septas and a Pope equivalent called a High Septon. The High Septons all give up their names when they become one to confuse future historians (and readers).
** High Septon 1 Fatfuck: A fat, greedy man who used the position for personal gain. He ended up being [[Grimdark|torn apart in a riot]], because the people resented that he had enough food to stay fat while they were starving.
** High Septon 2 Lannister Puppet: Successor of High Septon Fatfuck. Chosen by Tyrion so the Faith would be loyal to the Lannisters. Only ''slightly'' corrupt, being a pro-Lannister yes-man. Murdered on Cersei's order in the book, while in the show he's retconned into a whoremonger who gets deposed by the Sparrows (see below).
** High Septon 3/The High Sparrow: Successor of High Septon Lannister Puppet. After the second High Septon shown in the present day of the story died, the smallfolk burst into the meeting to pick a successor and ordered their chosen candidate to be put in charge when his original successor was caught whoremongering. He'd been a wandering preacher beforehand, and his feet were dark and gnarled from lots of walking. When he reaches the position he starts [[gets shit done|getting things done]]. Since he was appointed by a smallfolk religious movement called Sparrows, he's given the moniker "The High Sparrow". The nobility underestimates him, either due to having other matters or disregard for religious people, but he turns out to be smart, well-meaning and somewhat ruthless. Under the High Sparrow, he and the other clergymen sell their fancy clothes and decorations [[Noblebright|replacing them with simple wool tunics, using the money to buy food and clothes for the poor in King's Landing]]. He also has their Knights-Templar-equivalent reformed to [[Inquisition|protect the faithful and help them root out]] [[heresy]] and sin. He also outwits Cersei and has her arrested and tried for all her evil deeds. While Cersei's scheming does lead to Margaery's arrest, Cersei confesses to some crimes while concealing others, leading to Cersei taking a nude walk of penance in front of the entire city. After this, he somewhat reined in the nobles' politicking to actually look after the commoners and the Faith, though this does make some enemies. In the show, while he still talks of helping the Smallfolk, he and the Sparrows are [[C.S Goto|flanderized]] from assorted smallfolk and clergymen tired of the nobles' lawlessness and power plays into one-dimensional stereotypes and thinly-veiled jabs at the Catholic Church [[Imperial Truth|in a shoe-horned anti-religion message]]. While they do arrest Cersei and Margaery like in the books, the High Sparrow's plans all come to nothing, as during the trial most of the Faith, including the High Sparrow himself, get blown to Kingdom Come when Cersei has her agents ignite a massive amount of magical napalm underneath the Great Sept. In the books they're much more like Martin Luther and the Lutherans, except that the Protestant Reformation wins outright.
* [[Old Ones|Old Gods]]: Native American/Japanese Kame/Druid/nature spirits that reside in places called Godswoods. The original practitioners of this faith were the Children of the Forest, non-elf looking Wood Elves, whose magics were responsible for smashing an entire Southern Warhost with tsunamis (leaving only a narrow isthmus between the North and everyone else), the Wall (it was a collaborative effort with humans), and allowing people to look into the past, and (confirmed in the show at least) influence it.
**Their powers are limited to the North, though, where the last remaining Godswoods remain, but they can grant gifted individuals awesome psychic powers like Warging (mind-controlling animals) and Greensight (Time Travel). For some reason, Martin claims they're based off the Norse Gods. Probably has to do with the way the Vikings made sacrifices to their gods, by hanging them in Ash trees, a symbol for the World Tree Yggdrasil. The Weirwood trees are sacred to the followers of the Old Gods in a similar way. Mostly worship of them is quiet and informal.
*R'hllor: The God of Fire and Light, and like the Old Gods, actually shows evidence for existing. [[/tg/ gets shit done|He gets shit done]], being one of the most common faiths East of Westeros, and his priests have powers such as fire magic and motherfucking Resurrection. Has a nasty habit for burning heretics, though. GRRM said this faith is roughly based (read: poorly modelled after) upon Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism. His nemesis is The Great Other: the god of cold and darkness, the leader of the Others, and prophesied to be defeated by the chosen one, or messianic figure: [[Star Child|Azor Ahai/The Prince That Was Promised]], a figure who is the prophesied warrior that will fight with the Great Other/Night's King during the Apocalypse. Interestingly enough, the prophecy may not refer to a single person, but three (Jon, Tyrion/Bran, and Daenerys). Supposedly, one of these three will also receive an [[Emperor's Sword|awesome flaming sword called "Lightbringer"]].
**R'hllor is very popular among the slaves and poor of the East, though Eastern nobles hate him because of that association. It's actually hard-to-tell how many "miracles" ascribed to him are actually real miracles. Stannis, absolute chad though he is, has a sword called "Lightbringer" meant to evoke the mythical one, but Aemon has [[Bullshit|noticed that it doesn't give off any heat]].
**For obvious reasons, they are ''very excited'' that there are Dragons again.
* Him of Many Faces: The god of the Dead of the religion whose followers are the [[Officio Assassinorum|Faceless Men]]. According to his cult of assassins, whom Arya joins, all gods of death are just him: since every religion has a god of death of some sort, he ''must'' be the only one that's real. Of course, your mileage may vary as to whether he's real or not, though his most awesome followers are granted shapeshifting abilities and powers to be the ultimate assassins.
* Drowned God: Cthulhu combined with Odin. Runs an underwater Valhalla were all Ironborn go whey they either if they drowned at sea, the men die a manly death or the women die in childbirth. Probably doesn't exist or he would have done something about Euron Greyjoy... at least in the books. There, Euron is [[Imperial Truth|proudly scornful]] of him, and his brother Aeron fruitlessly and endlessly mutters "no godless man can sit the Seastone Chair". In the show, Euron is perfectly happy to go through the traditional Drownie coronation ritual and Aeron performs it.
* The Night's King: This is completely different depending on whether you prefer the [[oldfag|books]] or [[newfag|show]]. Book version: A long time ago, when the Night's Watch was just barely getting set up, its Lord Commander, the thirteenth in line, decided to climb over the Wall and explore some. While in the woods to the north of the Wall, he found a beautiful [[Monstergirls|Other female]]. He fell in love with her, had [[/d/|sex with her on top of the Wall]], which somehow changed him into an albino version of [[Star Wars|Darth Maul]], and set himself up as King of the Wall, making everyone in the Watch his slaves and sacrificial fodder. Naturally, this didn't sit too well with the Starks and the Wildlings, and so they banded together to free the Watch and kick his ass, which they managed to do successfully. Now everyone thinks him as dead or a myth. Show version: he was the very first White Walker ever created by the Children, and he decided to get back at them by wiping out all life. Also, whilst he was apparently beaten in the ancient past and sealed away behind the Wall, he's still "alive" and well, [[Daemonculaba|turning infant human boys into new White Walkers]]. Also, he can apparently raise up entire legions of undead, just by raising his arms and looking completely smug about it; unlike regular Others, who can just raise up maybe a village at most. Given that he's the resident [[BBEG|Dark Lord]] of the series, it makes sense that he can take down a dragon with seemingly little effort (a simple throw of his spear), and resurrect it to be his personal steed a la Arthas. (Whether that particular nonsense is going to show up in the books is up in the air, it's suitably grimdark and not particularly [[derp]] so it might.) Then he used the dragon to blow a hole in the Wall and begin [[The End Times]] for Westeros. But [[FAIL|dead]], thanks to Arya's magic ninja haxx which let her [[what|kill the BBEG and his entire race and army of zombies ''in one blow.'']]
** The Others/The White Walkers: A mysterious race from beyond the Wall, known to [[newfag|HBO fans]] as "the White Walkers". Can be described as ice demons/snow elves with necromancy. Eight thousand years ago, they invaded Westeros during a decades-long winter (even longer than the usual years-long winters) known as "the Long Night". With an army of undead warriors, they proceeded to fuck Westeros up every which way to [[Sunday]] before the locals finally drove them out, established the Night's Watch, and built the Wall to keep them out. Like all fantasy aspects of ASOIAF, they are very cliched.
**In the TV series, it's revealed that they were created from human captives by "The Children", the pseudo-[[Elf]] fair folk race that lived in Westeros before humanity arrived, as an attempt to create a super-weapon. The idea was since humanity bred faster than the Children could keep up with, they would create icy [[lich]]-creatures that could create [[undead]] soldiers, and these would then wipe out all human life. Instead, it went disastrously wrong because it turned out that the Children actually couldn't control what they'd created, so the Others [[Ork|just want to exterminate '''all''' life.]] In both versions the Night's King is in control.
*'''Other Eastern Magic/Religions''' - The further and further east you go, the more GRRM scatters Lovecraft references to give the world flavour, like the Shadowlands and its cities of oily, black stone, Leng, and [[Deep Ones|fish people]]. They're just references, though, and will likely never be important.
**The Unsullied have their own goddess, the Lady of Spears, [[Slaanesh|whose altar they burn their dicks on as offerings]].
**The slavers worship a harpy goddess and justify their slavery through her.
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==Locations==

'''Westeros''': The continent where about 80% of the plot takes place. Scotland in the North, Siberia/Northern Scandinavia beyond the wall, Moorish Spain in the South, with the rest being England as far as climate is concerned, only much, much larger.
*The North: By far the largest of the Seven Kingdoms in size, and the least in population. [[Naggaroth|A rocky, cold and dangerous landscape where life barely tolerable]] ([[Norsca|although it's still preferrable to the eldrich lands beyond the wall]]), sometimes it even snows in summer, giving you a general idea why it's quite a shitty place to be in when compared with the more southern kingdoms. Living in it are the Northmen, culturally an inbetween of Northern English and Scots. Most of them still revere the Old Gods and practice traditions that feel very alien to those living in the south, of the First Men culture before the Andal Invasion, still holding out here and the Iron Islands. It's also damn near unconquerable by conventional means due to the narrow isthmus between it and the south being a noxious swamp; . Its ruling house at the beginning of the Story is House Stark, later House Bolton; Its capital is Winterfell.
*Iron Islands: Large, rocky archipelago off the coast of the North and the Riverlands. Their bleak and inhospitable landscape is the major reason why the Ironmen culture, the other hold out of the First Men culture in Westeros which has the unique blend of only political and not cultural Andal influence and lack of Children of the Forest influence as Weirwoods don't grow on islands and only First Men humans ever lived here during those times, is so centered around pillaging and raiding; you can't grow crops on rock. Does have a decently sized economy based around metal working, but nowhere near enough to support its populace. Their capital is Pyke.
*Riverlands: As the name says, the Riverlands are marked by several large rivers flowing through it and the large fertile valleys surrounding them. The historical whipping boy of the continent after the Andal Invasion took over the old First Men realms (minus the North and the Iron Islands), constantly fought over by the Westerlands, the Stormlands, the Reach, the Iron Islands and the Vale, to the point that it was under Iron Islands rule when Aegon Targaryen unified the continent minus Dorne. Gets buttfucked the hardest during the War of the Five Kings by a metric ton; first by the Mountain carrying out a campaign of terror against the civilian populace on Tywin's orders and second by most of the major fights between the Lannisters and the Starks taking place there. Honestly, after all the fighting, raping and pillaging happening in the Riverlands, one must wonder how many people are actually still left in them. Their ruling house is House Tully (later House Baelish); its Capital is Riverrun (later Harrenhal).
*Vale of Arryn: Mountainous Region east of the Riverlands home to (supposedly) the finest knights in Westeros due to them having constant field practice in crushing rebellion after rebellion of the native <s>Irish</s> Mountain Tribes (think Forsworn from Skyrim, only a lot more foul-mouthed) and having an absolute abundance of tiny territories to give out. The population lives more densely packed in the few large cities and townships that exist here due and traversing them is dangerous. Its ruling house is House Arryn, its capital The Eyrie, '''the''' hardest castle to take in Westeros as it is built on a mountaintop. Gulltown, one of the cities of Westeros, is the main economic hub.
*Westerlands: The second-smallest Kingdom in size but by far the richest due to its abundance of Gold and Silver Mines. Has a proud tradition of fucking everyone over by the means of money, politics or both combined. Also has a substantial importance as a major trading and naval hub in the city of Lannisport, which is the largest port on the western side of the continent. Its ruling house is House Lannister, its capital Casterly Rock. Casterly Rock was the capital of the old Kings, House Casterly, which was outsmarted by [[Lukas the Trickster|Lann the Clever]], who married the last surviving daughter and founded House Lannister.
*Crownlands: The lands directly controlled by the Iron Throne, surrounding a big bay, with a rather pleasant, mild climate. Centered around the capital King's Landing, which gets an entry of its own. Its ruling house is always the house of the current kings. Formerly divided between the Riverlands and the Stormlands.
**King's Landing: The capital of the seven kingdoms and by far its largest city. It houses every important institution on the continent, most importantly the Red Keep, where the King of the Seven Kingdoms resides and the Great Sept of Baelor, the religious center of the Faith of the Seven. Aside from the Red Keep and the Great Sept, a filth ridden, downtrodden shithole that is rife with poverty and criminals whereever you may set foot; the City Guard is openly corrupt and acts more like a government-approved gang of thugs. It seems to be something of an unofficial sport among all chacters in the books to never say anything good the city. Architecturally described like Medieval London, at the size of 1600s Paris.
**Dragonstone: An old Valyrian outpost located on a small, rocky island some miles off the coast of King's Landing. Used to be the actual seat of House Targaryen, even though they had resided in King's Landing ever since Aegon conquered the Seven Kingdoms. Castle Dragonstone was clearly of Valyrian design, as its architecture and design felt foreign and ancient to the Westerosi who resided here. Also notable for sitting on a huge deposit of Obsidian. After the Targaryens were driven from Westeros, Robert gave Dragonstone to Stannis, who never made peace with the fact that Robert effectively robbed him of his rightful title as heir to Storm's End.
*The Reach: The second-largest of the Seven Kingdoms, and the most populous. Its wide plains, dominated by fields and plantings serve as the breadbasket of the Seven Kingdoms. Also home to the oldest city in Westeros, Oldtown, which in turn is home to the Citadel of the Maesters. Its ruling house is Tyrell, its capital Highgarden. House Tyrell is matrilineally descended from Garth Greenhand like many other houses. The old ruling family, House Gardener, Garth's direct descendants, was wiped out when Aegon unleashed his dragons, with the then Lord of House Tyrell (at this point permanent stewards to House Gardener), was placed in control as he was married to the last Gardener female.
*Stormlands: The lands of House Baratheon, a mix of forested mountains and steep, stony shores: so-named for the very frequent storms that batter its coast. The weather here is so bad, their capital is known as Storm's End because all previous castles were destroyed by the weather, so this one had to be built <s>by a competent Northman architect</s> with magic. In spite of the dangerously bad weather, the area can be quite beautiful when not being battered by the elements. The Baratheons are descended from a loyal general who served the original Aegon, who was also rumored to be his half-brother. After Robert ascended the throne, control of the Stormlands was left to his youngest brother, Renly, while the middle-brother, Stannis, was assigned to guard Robert's back on the much-smaller, less prestigious island of Dragonestone.
*Dorne: The southernmost region of Westeros and the hottest (in more ways than just temperature), consists of rocky deserts in its center and lush, meditterrean areas on its coasts. The Dornish people differ a lot from other Westerosi in ethnicity and culture and have a different origin, that of the migrating Rhoynar people interbreeding with the then relatively isolated local Westerosi. [[Dune|Dorne was also the only Kingdom to successfully resist conquest by the Targaryens]] and was only brought into the fold through political marriages, and their rulers retain the title of Prince (the Rhoynar and the local Westerosi don't use king or queen, they use prince or princess), not afforded to anyone else not of the Royal Family. Its ruling house is Martell, its capital Sunspear.
*The Wall: A wall of ice of gargantuan proportions erected by the First Men to protect themselves against the Others/White Walkers long ago that marks the nothern border of Westeros proper and runs across it from west to east for three hundred miles. In the times when the Night's Watch was under full strength, it was an impenetrable fortification against anything that might dare to cross it, not just because of its sheer dimensions, but also the implication that the wall itself is reinforced by eldrich magic keeping the horrors beyond the wall at bay via unnatural means. Nowadays only three of its 19 keeps are permanently manned, leaving wide gaps in the Night's Watch defense against Wildlings, who sometimes climb over it to raid the South. The Night King tears a hole into it with one of Daenerys' Dragons in the final episode of season 7, allowing him and his undead army to pass through.
*Beyond-the-Wall:
**Craster's Keep: Not really a "keep" but the [[GRIMDARK|home of a man who fucks his own daughters and offers his sons to the Others]]. He is one of the very few "independent" wildlings and offers use of his home to the Night's Watch when they go off on scouting expeditions. Because it's full of servile (inbred) women, the men of the Night's Watch mutiny and take it over.
**Thenn: The name of both the land and its people, the Thenn consider themselves to be the ''true'' "last of the First Men," because they have laws and lords compared to the anarchist free-for-all of the other Free Folk; they don't speak common, they can actually smith, and they treat the "Magnar," the title of their king, like a god. In the show, they're just shown to be a bunch of scarred barbarians.
**Lands of Always Winter: The furthest north people have ever gone and have been able to come back from, the Lands are perpetually frozen, and the Others are said to come from here. Clearly, if you head far enough North, you'll hit a Chaos Rift and end up in the Warp.

'''The Stepstones''': Formerly a solid land bridge between Westeros and Essos, it was brought down by Children of the Forest magic in a failed attempt to stop the First Men invasion. Now an archipelago of islands infested by various ne'er-do-wells.

'''Essos''': A huge landmess (no, not a typo) about southeast of Westeros and home to many independent city-states west of the big mountain range. Generally agreed upon to be largely desolate wilderness sprinkled in with the occasional kingdoms that seem exotic and alien to Westerosi. Most of its western half used to be the center of power of the legendary Valyrian Freehold, with the Free Cities being colonies of them that survived the downfall of the Valyrian Empire hundreds of years ago. The exceptions are Slaver's Bay, conquered by the Valyrians before regaining independence after the Freehold's collapse, Qarth, Ib and some of the others.
*Old Valyria: The former center of the [[Roman Empire|all-powerful free state that ruled over most of Essos at its peak and posessed magic and technology, as well as dragons to keep control over it.]] Valyrias strength was legendary, so much so in fact that the downfall of it still influences politics in the world centuries after it occured. No one quite knows why Valyria fell, the only certain thing is that it was plagued by a sudden series of natural disasters that all but destroyed its homelands and left it in ruin. Valyrian culture only survived in bastardized forms in the Free Cities and, prior to their extinction, House Targaryen in Westeros. The ruins of Valyria are said to cursed and avoided by all but the most desperate of travelers. Traveling through Valyria is similar to sailing through the [[Eye of Terror]]: not only are you dealing with dangerous seas (''boiling seas'' akin to underwater tectonic activity), but also fucking [[daemons]], and [[Gellerpox Infected|parasitic plagues]].
*Free Cities: There are 9 city-states on the Western Half of Essos. 8 are former Valyrian colonies, with Braavos being the notable exception to most of the things they have in common. What ties them all together is that they're all connected by trade and feudalism isn't such a big thing here, which also makes their culture remarkably different from the Westerosi. Westerosi tend to view them as greedy opportunists while the Free Cities in turn view Westerosi as ignorant morons at best and backwards savages at worst. If you were going to have a setting based on ASOIAF and didn't want to spend the entire time shitting in the dirt or bleeding out in a ditch for some inbred noble, this is where you'd want to be:
**Braavos: The only one of the nine free cities to not be a Valyrian Colony (excepting the other countries like Qarth and Ib, who don't count among the nine). It was founded by Slaves that escaped their overlord in a marsh on the northernmost tip of Essos. It is mainly known for its massive port and the Iron Bank of Braavos, the biggest bank in the world. It also houses the House of Black and White, the central temple and headquarters of the Faceless Men.
**Pentos: Another large trading port on the western edge of Essos. It serves as the major trading hub between Westeros and the rest of Essos.
**Lys: Located on an island off the coast of Essos. Founded as a resort for Freeholders, it has the largest population with the Valyrian phenotype in the known world. A decadent city whose most famous export are prostitutes.
**Myr: The women here are hot, considering how often Westerosi seem to come back with wives from here. Other than that, its only notable feature is its forever-war with Lys and Tyrosh.
**Norvos: They make really good bodyguards that are taught to see their [[Executioners|axes as their waifus]].
**Qohor: Not much is known about them, except one of the brutal mercenary companies is from here, and they worship the [[Lovecraft|Black Goat.]]
**Tyrosh: Greedy slavers. Not really notable, except they're one-third of the constant warfare of the Disputed Lands along with Lys and Myr and for being extremely flamboyant.
**Volantis: The crown jewel, first colony of the Freehold and considers itself the successor state to the Freehold.
**Lorath: No, they don't speak for the trees. Lorath is the poorest of the Free Cities, and not much is known about them. Its most notable feature are the underground labyrinths that dot the island and which predate the Valyrians. Typical of Martin, the Labyrinths and a similar cult in Essos (the cult of the Pattern) are a reference to someone else's work, [[Dick|but no, he doesn't like fanfiction]].
*Ghiscari Empire and Slavers Bay: To the East of Valyria and the Free Cities, these cities pre-date Valyria. Before they were conquered, they had their own empire and worshiped the Harpy. Nowadays, they trade with the Dothraki, exchanging tribute for slaves, which they then market to the rest of the World. Vaguely the [[Middle East]] of ASOIAF. They are: Old Ghis, New Ghis, Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen. In the books, Dany is stuck here trying to manage the clusterfuck that is deslaverizing these lands. Currently locked in a brutal war where the newly-freed slaves are either fighting the surviving slaver-nobles, other cities, or each other.
*Qarth: What separates the "East" from the "Far East." It's to the East of Slaver's Bay and West of not!China/Japan, so any traffic between the Free Cities, Slaver's bay, and them, requires them to pass through Qarth. Home to a bunch of fucking weirdo Orientalist tropes that vie for power: The Pureborn, the noble descendants of ancient Qaathi Kings and Queens that fled the sacking of their cities to Qarth, so hold no real power beyond their titles; the Ancient Guild of Spicers (it's in the name); the Thirteen, ''another'' group of Merchants; the Tourmaline Brotherhood (more merchants!). Qarth is also the location of the House of the Undying, a group of Warlocks that drink "shade-of-the-evening," which is pretty much [[Dune|Spice from Dune]], but made from trees and not wormshit; the House of the Undying and most of its Warlocks were burnt down by Dany's dragons after they tried to steal them; they sent out some guys for revenge, but they ran into Euron where he promptly murdered them all and took their <s>spice</s> <s>nightshade</s> shade-of-the-evening. Functionally Singapore, but with a more Indo-Persian aesthetic.
*Rhoyne: Destroyed former city of the Rhoynar, who fled the Valyrian Freehold and migrated to Dorne. The former capital is currently infested by Stone-Men, Greyscale survivors who have gone feral.
*Ib: not!Dwarfs, but described more like Neanderthals than Nordic shorties. They're [[squat]], barrel-chested, with thick wiry black hair, heavy sloping eye brows and square-teeth of neanderthals, They're also incredibly hairy, and even their women have facial hair., Instead of digging holes in mountains, they travel the sees in equally-stocky whaling ships. They tend to keep to themselves, [[Meme|but are natural sailors, suitable for long voyages]].
*The Dothraki Sea: Not a sea, but the name for the not!Eurasian Plains. Before the Freehold collapsed and the Dothraki tribesmen took advantage of the chaos of the Century of Blood to conquer it and burn down all but one of the old Qaathi cities (with only Qarth itself surviving) and most of the old Kingdom of Sarnor along with other minor cities, it was known as the Great Grass Sea.
**Vaes Dothrak: The capital and only permanent Dothraki settlement. It is forbidden to carry weapons or spill blood here (doesn't mean you can't kill through other means).
*Golden Empire of Yi Ti: Not!China, with a mysterious history and pattern of legends eerily-similar to Westeros' own. Like China, has a long history of Emperors, each dynasty progressively ruling over smaller, weaker empires. The current dynasty is actually so weak, they're not taken seriously outside their capital.
**The Five Forts: In the not!Chinese version of the Long Winter/Long Night, the Empire of Yi Ti was cast into a long night that never ended, where the evil Lion of the Night was unleashed by the Bloodstone Emperor. He was beat back by the Lord of Light/Hyrkoon the Hero/but the name that the Yi Ti know him by was never stated. Just like the Wall in Westeros, the Five Forts were said to be erected by a great Emperor soon after to make sure the crisis never happens again. Just like Westeros, the Five Forts have waned in importance, now only protecting the Yi Ti from barbarians. The Five Forts are said to be made from a material of "fused black stone," similar in description to many ancient ruins all over the setting. Harrenhal is also described similarly, but Harrenhal was stone melted by dragonfire, so the idea that the Five Forts was made with the aid of dragons and/or magic has been floated by fans.
*The Jogos Nhai: not!Mongols, but they ride Zebras and are literally cone-heads.
*Asshai-by-the-Shadow: Further-Further-East, it may as well be mythic. The city of Asshai is depressingly gloomy, the entire city is composed of dark black towers made of fused, black stone that seems to "drink the light."

The South:
'''Summer Isles''': Think Avelorn, but Black. An archipelago to the Far South of Westeros, everything here is pretty idyllic. War is very formalized, prostitution is a religious rite, it's practically paradise. A deposed prince was sent to exile in Westeros and had been trying to get Robert to make the journey south to put him back on the throne, but no one really took him seriously.

'''Sothoryos''': [[Lustria|Jungle hell]].
*Yeen: Made of the same creepy black metal in Stygai, implied to be an old Empire of the Dawn Outpost. Even the death world jungle (as in, not just the animals, the actual jungle itself) refuses to go in there for fear of dying.

'''Ulthos''': not!Australia, and has absolutely no lore. Seriously, GRRM has literally never mentioned it except in relation to another place that also has no lore. It's a passing mention that his obsessive fans took note of, and when they literally helped wrote the setting book for him, their guess became canon.

==The appeal of A Song of Ice And Fire==
Exactly what catches the eyes of [[Skub|a given fan/critic/lout who complains about how bad it is anytime the show is mentioned within earshot]] to ASOIAF and its TV adaptation varies from individual to individual. Still, there's a couple of major draws.

'''The Worldbuilding:''' The main reason why this series gets compared to [[The Lord of the Rings]], ASOIAF is literally ''drowning'' under the weight of its worldbuilding, being crammed as full of facts about fictitious regions, histories, cultures, dynasties and races as GRRM can fit it. Your mileage will vary on how ''good'' that info is, but there's plenty of info in it. It is worth noting that much of the vagueness of various aspects of the world's lore comes down to the limited perspectives of each of the characters' point of view, so many places and events are often only known partially through superstition, rumors, and often second hand experiences passed down and muddled over time; all of which play quite heavily into the overall story structure of the series.

'''A vast colorful Cast:''' A lot of works of fantasy get by with a few archetypal characters (the Young Guy out to Prove themself, the Wise Wizard, the Dark Lord, the Mischievous One, the Grizzled Veteran, the Princess, the Dwarf, etc) and maybe a guy or two which rises above this. A Song of Ice and Fire has dozens of viewpoint characters and a hundreds of secondaries each with different situations, drives, motives and quirks that make them reasonably interesting. Even if you don't like one or some of them, there are plenty of others. When they die, it often hits home. Speaking of which...

'''Mainstream [[Dark Fantasy]]:''' Dark Fantasy is not exactly a mainstream niche. ASOIAF stands out by deliberately trying to market itself to the mainstream, despite embracing an abundance of dark fantasy tropes; gratuitous violence, sexuality and sexual violence, moral ambiguity, political intrigue, and a willingness to suddenly kill off any character, even the most likeable or heroic of them.

'''[[Low Fantasy]]:''' On the surface, ASOIAF is an old-school Low Fantasy setting, being a medieval-tech world with the story openly focused on the mundane lives of people struggling for political power and though supernatural elements do exist, they tend to be used sparingly.

'''[[High Fantasy]]:''' But if you scratch the surface, ASOIAF is also a High Fantasy setting, which is always the more marketable of the two, with the big backstory about how the world is facing impending doom from an army of wintery [[fey]] and their [[undead]] minions. There are also non-evil higher powers working against them, but they get swept under the rug in the show. Also, [[dragon]]s. As the more marketable genre, it's also inevitably the more skubby one, for whatever that's worth.

'''[[Magical Realm|Gratuitous Sexuality]]:''' More a thing for the TV show than the books; GRRM's scenes were [[Rape|raepy]] in the earlier volumes, and apparently our boy must have overheard the nickname "George Rape Rape Martin (I ''Like'' Rape)", because he dialed back the forced boning in #4-5. The frequent scenes of nudity and sex in the early seasons of the show were a ''big'' selling point for many people (the casting of people from the sex industry for some of these scenes also helped).

'''Not much in terms of generic fantasy tropes:''' Hate how almost every fantasy just has to have things popularized by Tolkien such as elves, dwarves, orcs and all that stuff? You're in luck because ASOIAF doesn't have a "five races" system, their accompanying stereotypes or the plot hinging on a magic item. On the other hand, it does have several generic fantasy tropes, such as [[dragon]]s, [[Medieval Stasis]], [[undead]] and at least two contenders for [[BBEG|Dark Lord]] status, so if you hate them too, well...

'''Lots of Houses and Sigils''': OK, so this is sort of a joke...except not completely. For those who are artistically minded and love coming up with their own OC groups and/or fleshing out minor characters, this setting really does invite it with the absolutely insane number of houses [[Space Marines|that each have their own distinct logo/color-scheme combo]].

==Oh Yeah, About The TV Show==
[[image:KnightsWhoSayFuck.jpg|150px|thumb|left|Yeah, pretty much.]]

{{Skubby}}

After the first three books became hits, many Hollywood producers and directors had come to the sadistic neckbeard, asking him about making a movie adaptation. At first, he was reluctant at best, due to the fact that a lot of his content would've been cut out to fit into a movie trilogy (see the Lord of the Rings live-action films). Then, a couple of dudes, David Benioff and D.B/Daniel Brett Weiss (AKA D&D, or more accurately as of the final season, Dumb & Dumber), decided to contact him and asked him at a local restaurant about turning ASOIAF into a Television show produced by HBO, the top-rated soft-core porno channel. The story goes that George asked them a very specific question (Who is Jon Snow's mother?). Satisfied with the response they gave, he gave them permission to start work on the show, which would be titled after the first book, ''Game of Thrones''. They would later go on to prove that this is not a good way of choosing who should adapt your work.

The television show casts several well-known performers, such as Sean Bean as Eddard, Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, Lena Headey as Cersei, and Charles Dance as Tywin. They have also cast some comparatively less well-known actors and even ones new to cinema, such as Sophie Turner (Sansa), Maisie Williams (Arya), Kit Harington (Jon), Iwan Rheon (Ramsay), Alfie Allen (Theon), and Richard Madden (Robb)

Thus, book snobs seem to think that every episode post-season 4 is nothing more than Emmy-bait. Regardless of the fact Kit Harington still [[Fail|doesn't have an Emmy]], there's a valid contention in that regard, with the number of liberties taken overshadowing the initial appeal.

The final season (more on that below) was eventually revealed to be such a train wreck because Dumb & Dumber did not want to work on the series anymore and had let the success with the earlier seasons go to their heads. In their arrogance, instead of handing the reins to someone else, they decided to plan out their own ending and use it as an audition to Disney so they could write for Star Wars. By then, they'd run out of books to adapt, there was no superior writing for them to leech off of and there was no one to gainsay them in their echo chamber of a writer's room (even George himself was cut out). The result was absolutely shit writing that caused a glorious breakage in the [[skub]] dam that left [[Butthurt|many a fan's anus weeping]] (provided they weren't early seasons fans, book series fans, or any of the other assorted onlookers [[Lulz|taking part in the mightiest of keks]]) and, if anything proved <s>George's </s> Ramsay's quote at the beginning of the article true. Goddamn Dumb & Dumber, could you talentless Derp machines do any worse if you tried? Luckily, comeuppance came after them and Disney, having some sense, told them to fuck off with their [[Star Wars]] ideas after the backlash towards the final season. Not that Disney Star Wars has been without its share of controversy and [[Rage]], but you know it's bad when someone gets told to piss off from even that.

The Greatest Irony and Tragedy of the show's writing was that in the first few seasons, with George RR Martin consulting them and with a wealth of material from the first few books to work with, D&D were actually pretty damn good at adapting the books into a TV format. In fact, quite a few scenes were in fact not only adapted, but actually created from scratch outside of the source material. One of the most noteworthy is the iconic introduction of Tywin Lannister in Season 1 Episode 7, where we learn everything we need to know about his character with nothing but precisely chosen dialogue and a rather blunt visual metaphor of him gutting a stag he slew in a hunt, all while brutally laying into Season 1's initially perceived villain, Jaime. Contrast this with Season 5 where the show's major decline began with blunders such as the omission of fan-favorite Lady Stoneheart, literally butchering the Dorne subplot with Martell family team-killing and changing the Sparrows' movement to a militant atheist's stereotype of religion. This decline makes a lot more sense after George himself admitted that Season 5 was the first Season where he was was really locked out of the loop.

Goes to show how much they had fallen when the well ran dry and the show' writing and adaptation process was no longer the finely honed instrument it had started as.

'''TL;DR'''

[[GM|Producers Dumb&Dumber-style change characters and railroad the plot at a whim,]] [[/d/M|the tits and ultraviolence spigot is opened even wider than the books,]] and most scenes are made for the actors to show off their skills at making their signature angry/murder/brooding/etc. faces, and wrapped it up with a season of TV soon to be discussed that even Matt Ward would be 100% justified in pointing and laughing at. Seasons 1-4 are worth your time, 7 and 8 are best ignored, and 5 and 6 are the [[Skub]] ones.

===The Final <s>Dumpster Fire</s> Season===
{{Fail}}
{{HurfDurf}}
{{Plot Armour}}

{{Topquote|If you try to do something fancy with your ending and you screw up, your audience will probably remember the botched ending more than the well run marathon|JP from Terrible Writing Advice (and advice Dumb and Dumber obviously didn't heed}})

Seasons 5, 6, and especially 7 all got their share of grief from people. Mostly deserved in the case of Season 7 and [[Skub|arguably so]] for 5 and 6 (though the latter did at least finally give Ramsay his just desserts, most of the problems that cropped up in 5 and 6 happened when the show passed the book in particular plotlines and mostly served as an early warning, 7 is when things started getting criticized in general rather than individual plots or details). Season 8 though? Well, read on:

The Final Season kicks off with the Night King's army attacking Winterfell in a battle meant to be epic, but instead so chock full of tactical [[Fail|fails]] from the living, they make General Custer look like Sun Tzu. The most infamous examples include Melisandre's powers being underutilized, putting soldiers in front of trenches/walls they should be behind/standing on, no flanking charges and hiding the non-combatants in a crypt while fighting necromancers. The battle is resolved when Arya teleports directly to the BBEG and kills him with some sleight-of-hand that destroys his entire army Keystone Army trope-style and ends the winter. Also Theon, Jorah and Melisandre die, but the story sweeps their deaths under the rug like they're nameless background characters.

Then the Westerosi go full-retard and start hating Daenerys. Yes really; Dany helped end a nation-destroying winter plus a zombie apocalypse, has a claim to the throne AND is their best ally against Cersei... but they want her gone. Even Sansa suddenly turns against Dany and starts seeking the throne, despite having no claim to the rest of Westeros and Dany being easily able to kill her for treason. Everyone inexplicably starts wanting Jon to be king despite his attempt to abdicate, and Jon himself even starts thinking Aunt Daenerys might be a bad queen... but that doesn't stop him from [[Incest Smith|starting a sexual relationship with her]]. The fact that Robert's bastard son Gendry is now a lord, giving him a claim to the throne at least as strong as Dany's or Jon's, is swept under the rug. Varys also jumps ship from Dany to Jon for no reason, even trying to kill Dany in an uncharacteristically stupid move. For his efforts, Tyrion reports Varys to Daenerys, who has Varys executed by Drogon's fire-breath.

Then Daenerys press-gangs people who should logically be happy to fight for her into an army to attack King's Landing and brings them there by sea. Along the way Rhaegal, one of Daenerys' two surviving dragons, is killed by ballistae from Euron's ships. This is despite the facts that Daenerys and her dragons should've easily been able to spot the ships, they were flying well out of ballista range and Euron had no way of knowing where they'd be. After Daenerys and Drogon single-handedly destroy the Iron Fleet (amid poorly animated weather*), they reach King's Landing. Cersei's artillery does nothing despite Daenerys, all her advisors and her dragon being within lethal range plus Cersei's lack of scruples. They in turn do nothing but watch Daenerys' friend Missandei, who was captured offscreen earlier, get executed by zombie-Gregor (despite the fact Cersei and co. had no reason to believe Missandei was anyone of import to either capture or execute. Maybe someone left a copy of the script in Cersei's solar next to her Starbucks latte**)

The battle for King's Landing has Daenerys' forces break in and battle through the streets. Meanwhile Jaime snuck though the tunnels [[Fail|to find and reconcile with Cersei. The Hound regresses to his old violent self and tracks down zombie-Gregor to take him down in a battle that kills them both (although most consider this the one bright spot in the episode). Arya gives up on revenge and decides to let Cersei go despite having strong non-revenge-related reasons to kill her]]. The famed Golden Company is quickly killed off and Cersei signals a surrender by ringing the bells (the bells aren't, and have never been, signals for surrender). Then, in the capstone of bad writing for this season, Daenerys' switch flips from good to evil because the writers want it to happen, and Dany abandons her plan of freeing and leading Westeros to purging King's Landing with her dragon and army. Cersei and Jamie die together in a cave-in and Tyrion mourns their deaths despite being ready and eager to personally kill Cersei earlier. This is followed by Dany's Saruman/Hitler-esque speech that has nothing to do with her former character. Tyrion is arrested for criticizing Daenerys by saying "If this is liberation, I don't believe in liberation theology." Yes, [[Derp|the writers think theology and ideology are the same thing]] (an unsurprising mistake, given they shoehorned in anti-religious rants for the past three Seasons despite the books' even-handedness). This last one has proven to be its own personal bit of Skub, as many have argued that Daenerys going evil is in keeping with the cynical themes and tone of the setting. While this isn't wrong on its face, it does nothing to change the fact that the execution is 100% half-assed. Walter White's descent into villainy this is not, or even Anakin's arc in the Star Wars Prequels, which looks like The Godfather compared to what Season 8 does with Daenerys.

In the aftermath, Jon assassinates Daenerys for the King's Landing massacre... [[Derp|right in front of her dragon]]. Drogon, due to Jon's stronger-than-Valyrian-steel-plot-armor, doesn't kill him but melts the Iron Throne ([[What|accidentally according to the showrunners]]) while chucking a tantrum before grabbing Dany's body and flying away. Jon is somehow charged with Dany's murder despite there being no evidence that he did it, but surprisingly none of the surviving characters still loyal to Dany try to kill Jon (such as the Unsullied or the Dothraki). Despite there being several legitimate choices of king still available, including Gendry, the nobles decide to replace a dynastic monarchy with an elective one and make Bran king. Bran is nominated by Tyrion for a nonsensical reason ("he has the best story"), Tyrion somehow getting a say in the meeting despite being imprisoned for treason.

The Unsullied go to Southros under command of Grey Worm (the only one who still has a personality at this point). The Dothraki are forgotten about by everyone else. Tyrion is freed and made Hand of the King to Brann. Brienne is made Commander of the Kingsguard. [[Derp|Bronn is made Master of Coin (and Lord of Highgarden) despite him not knowing how financial loans work. Gendry is completely forgotten. Samwell is made the new Grand Maester]] and [[What|the North secedes and becomes independent under Queen Sansa (which definitely wouldn't cause future problems and tensions)]]. [[The Lord of the Rings|Arya sails to the West]] for some unknown reason and Jon is exiled but doesn't care because he gets to go back up north with the Wildings like he wanted. The end.

This trainwreck of a plot is a testament to how two morons can royally fuck up a show beyond any redeeming qualities the cast and crew can put forward. And even then there were screw-ups among the production staff, such as *the animators being unable to decide whether the sky is sunny or overcast when Dany and Drogon destroy the Iron Fleet - which mattered because Dany's plan to not get shot down involved having the sun behind her - and **not removing the actors' water bottles and coffee cups from the set before shooting. Hyperbole is sort of the norm here, but it really is hard to overstate how badly Season 8's finale fucks up. Game of Thrones was ''everywhere'' culturally for most of the 2010s, drawing in huge numbers of people who would otherwise never be caught dead indulging in High Fantasy works with us uber-nerds. Now, the entire Thrones fandom has practically disappeared or gone underground. Honestly, it would be an impressive achievement if it weren't so terrible.

==House of the Dragon: The ''other'' TV show==

{{Topquote|If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.|Benjamin Franklin [[Star Wars:Rebels|(and also Maul when trying to kill Kanan)]]}}

Deciding that there was still a market for Game of Thrones stuff even after the last season turned the 2010s biggest pop-culture phenomenon into a laughingstock*, HBO bet the bank on some spin-offs, the first of which is now upon us. House of the Dragon is a prequel dealing with the Dance of Dragons, a civil war between two Targaryen factions that ends up consuming Westeros and everyone in it World-War style, and featuring lots of dragons fighting dragons and the standard Westeros fare of fairly bad people doing extremely bad things. Like Game of Thrones before it, it boasts a star-studded cast, a big budget, and a lot of hype. Time will tell if it redeems the failures of the original show or repeats them. If there's a reason to be optimistic (aside from Dumb and Dumber being absent), it would be that the whole story of the Dance of Dragons is written and mapped out, meaning the writers don't have to come up with their own shit to make an ending that George hasn't yet written. Has gotten off to a strong start, so there's the hope that it will be able to redeem the legacy GoT's last two seasons absolutely ruined.

*Given that the premiere was apparently so widely watched it crashed the streaming for many people, they might actually be right.

Ultimately, with Martin having more oversight over the writing of this series, and director Miguel Sapochnik actually having a passion for the setting and genre rather than just answering a mystery question to GRRM's satisfaction, the current 6 episodes have seen sky high bumps in both HBO viewership and rave reviews. The slow burn over years as the characters inch closer towards disaster has left the majority of viewers on a palpable knife's edge so far. By the time the 1st season wrapped up, the show had garnered enough praise and profit to warrant the green light by HBO for work on the next season, with out of the park critical and commercial praise, in most cases surpassing its Amazon LOTR contemporary ''Rings of Power'' with just a third of the budget per episode. In fact, George Martin was so moved by the performance of Paddy Considine as King Viserys Targaryen, that he stated that he wished he could tear out all that he wrote about the character in his books and rewrite it to match the show version.

==GRRM and [[Your Dudes]]==
Want to make your own ASoIF setting for a role-playing game? Well, readers have enough room to fantasize about their own minor noble House (or kingdom during the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms).

A good example of what you could do is the House from the old [[/v/|"Telltale Game of Thrones"]], House Forrester. Their relationship to the canon is as follows:

House Forrester (lords of someplace in the Wolfswood) '''-> is sworn to ->''' House Glover (overall lords of the entire Wolfswood) '''-> is sworn to ->''' House Stark (rulers of the North).

[[Fantasy Flight Games]] had a very brief tie-in making those annoying attention-sucking Facebook games, way back when FFG did that sort of thing. Just goes to show how even the other guys [[Games Workshop|will do anything for money]].

There's also an actual tie-in tabletop RPG now, which uses its own system and looks kind of like [[Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay]] with a heavy helping of resource-management strategy feel.
Players are assuming the role of a minor House to guide to glory, or, more accurately given the setting we're in, NOT to ruin utterly in a season or two, which would still be more than many A-list players mustered in canon. Each PC has a specific position within said House, and only the role of official Head is mandatory; the rest could be wife/children/brothers and sisters/all other kinds of siblings, bastards (with rules for obtaining the legitimate recognition), maesters, sworn/subservient knights, or most of anybody else. This naturally opens up near-infinite possibilities for families screwed up seven ways to high heavens, which would make Lannister's brand of infighting-slash-inbreeding look as sane as the High Septon.

The setting is also ill-suited for "adventures in Westeros" style of gaming for two reasons:
#In the grim darkness of low fantasy, a roaming nobody with no banner to talk about, no House allegiance, no nothing isn't generally treated to a Tavern With Quest Givers, but rather more to a Tavern Where You Are Shanked For Your Sword And Boots And Dumped At The Nearest Forest. Heck, even the big wheelers and dealers are routinely seen invited to the latter when they are slow to properly introduce themselves.
#Working on your initially-puny House will quite realistically involve thy neighbours first and foremost, then liege lords from the higher House yours is sworn to, and on occasion shopping around for an advantageous marriage - there simply ain't gonna be that much spare time to "travel to see places". Both of these are also why tourism wasn't a very popular pastime in medieval Europe (aside from Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Cologne and Santiago de Compostela) and why those who were "living on the road" usually enjoyed the lowest social standing.

A note to aspiring Lords: do NOT, under any circumstances, allow your "combat-optimized" siblings an unsupervised minute in a social setting. Game's "social combat" system is a thing more brutal than the physical one, and it takes a socially-optimized character all of a few minutes to mindfuck one who is not (read: everyone but dedicated diplomats and Heads of the Houses, and not every one of the latter, to boot, as illustrated by several amazing boneheads in canon) into believing pretty much anything short of Grumpkins and Snarks. Stupid NPCs or a stupid GM will make said mindfuck obvious, allowing you to "mindfuck 'em back" without abuse of OOC info; cunning ones will not.

On a side-note; GRRM is said to take a dim view of fanfiction, saying it kills creative ability. This is kind of a double-edged statement, since a lot of George's characters here are either rehashes of his characters from previous works, references to other fictional characters (like Littlefinger and Samwell being based on Jay Gatsby and [[The Lord of the Rings|Samwise Gamgee]]), walking tropes (such as Ned Stark and Robb Stark being the "[[TVTropes|Honor Before ]] [[Lawful Stupid|Reason]]" characters) or historical references (such House Lannister ripping off House Lancaster and House Tyrell being totally-not-House-Tudor - to the point that Margaery Tyrell is played by Natalie Dormer from "The Tudors" TV show). While this makes everything he wrote just another...fanfiction, and his disapproval hypocritical. Still, given the "creative" output of the average neckbeard, he's perhaps not entirely wrong. For another layer of irony/hypocrisy, he sold the rights to make a TV series of the books to HBO, who's adaptation would eventually devolve into a glorified fanfic.

==Games==
[[image:AGot-2nd-ed-cardfan.png|thumb|250px]]
Like any fantasy author who finds themselves unexpectedly in the warm embrace of commercial success, Martin quickly licensed the shit out of his setting; spawning everything from resin miniatures to replica great swords. While most of this is worthless junk to foist on [[Neckbeard|obsessive fanboys]] /tg/ has agreed that a few of the games are made of win. The first two are a collectable [[CCG|card game]] put out in 2002 by [[Fantasy Flight Games]] and a [[Risk]]-esque board game that followed shortly after in 2003. One of [[White Wolf]]'s subsidiaries also put out a [[d20 System|d20 RPG]] in 2005 but it quickly tanked because, come on, [[White Wolf]]. Martin since wrested the rights back and developed a new version with [[Green Ronin Games]].

Now let's have some serious talks about the Game of Thrones games, because they have become some sort of endless source of [[Skub|amusement and frustration]] for the gaming fanbase. Game of Thrones is, roughly speaking, the second franchise with the most licensed board games, after [[Star Wars]]. Some of them have acquired quite a legendary status and a fanbase that goes beyond the book or series fans.

The great juggernaut for all the ASOIAF-based games is [[Fantasy Flight Games]]:
* First and foremost we have [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/a-game-of-thrones-the-board-game-second-edition/ ''A Game of Thrones: The Board Game'']: a game that after two editions still ranks high in /bgg/'s top 100, and has recently had an expansion. The board game has become some sort of meme for the modern board gamers and it could be considered the equivalent of a more advanced [[Risk]], in which dice and blank character got replaced by a very flavourful and brutal combat system and a lot of thematical mechanics fueling the engine. Overall this game has been associated with concepts such as requiring maximum player count to really be entertaining, having an amazing amount of length and depth and being a very faithful representation of the political feeling the series inspired. Almost any boardgamer or wargamer worth his salt has played this game and enjoyed its highs, its lows and the amazing amount of frustrations it brings. This is probably the most well known of all the ASOIAF games and it was released way before Game of Thrones was a cultural phenomenon back in 2003.<br>
:It also has a digital edition, sold on Steam and Android

* Another game that bears mention, both for its excellent mechanics and its historical significance is [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/a-game-of-thrones-the-card-game-second-edition/ A Game of Thrones: The Card Game]. It is one of the most balanced card game experiences you can get, also full of flavour and with quite a great amount of balance and non-linear thinking. The best part is, unlike certain other popular card games, the game follows the living card game format: players know exactly what each booster pack brings and can buy cards in a more responsible manner, rather than playing bingo and hoping to get a rare card. Also, the sole core set already provides more replayability than some fully-fledged board games.

* Finally, the last game to mention in the [[Fantasy Flight Games|FFG]] venerable trilogy of games is [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/battles-of-westeros/ ''Battles of Westeros''], arguably the most ambitious and least successful of the three. Battles of Westeros was a fully-fledged wargame that used the [[Memoir 44]] and [[BattleLore]] rules as a base, but then evolved into its own by introducing mechanics such as commanders, tactic cards, and very creative scenario rules. Miniatures were made in 15mm and, for their time and scale, they were quite detailed; some commanders are real standouts (for example, Robb Stark's has his direwolf jumping at his side).<br>
:Thanks to its scale, the game was able to provide players with a great number of options and units at a fraction of the price of other board games. With a core set that was already stacked with units and variety, and then faction-specific expansions that added several more units and commanders. The game also came with scenario books that provided narrative play with quite creative rule variants, such as storming palisades, having decoys in escort missions, and bombarding enemies with catapults. One scenario even tried to bring to life the Battle of the Blackwater (the hybrid invasion of King's Landing by Stannis ''the God-Damn Mannis'' Baratheon). The game was incredible and quite a creative wargame, but its main issue was that the setup time was just terrible. Incredibly complex and tiresome when compared to the actual gameplay time.

There are others, such as the ASOIAF-themed [[Settlers of Catan|Catan]] expansion called [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/a-game-of-thrones-catan-brotherhood-of-the-watch/ ''A Game of Thrones Catan: Brotherhood of the Watch''], another card game called [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/hand-of-the-king/ ''A Game of Thrones: Hand of the King''], and another board game [https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/game-of-thrones-the-iron-throne/#/products-section ''Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne'']. The quality of those, however, remains to be seen.

And then the miniature-producing Kickstarter juggernaut [[CMON]] decided to produce its own [[wargame]], with AMAZING miniatures. The game began with, of course, a [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cmon/a-song-of-ice-and-fire-tabletop-miniatures-game Kickstarter], and after that, the game has had at least 2 dozen more releases with 3 more factions added.<br>
The game has some mechanics taken from rank and file games, such as [[Kings of War]], combining them with mechanics taken out of "battles of Westeros" particularly the tactics deck. A new page is in the works: [[ASOIAF Miniature Game]]

==Books==
*''A Game of Thrones''
*''A Clash of Kings''
*''A Storm of Swords'':
*''A Feast for Crows'': half the characters, the point where the series goes down the toilet: most of the pov characters in AFFC are either unlikeable (Cersei, Sansa, Arianne) or are downright side characters of little consequence (Greyjoys, all of the other Martells); most of the characters you're actually reading the books for are in Dance, which is even longer than this book
*''A Dance with Dragons'': split into 2 the first is about the other half of the characters, and manages to pick things up a bit
*''The Winds of Winter'': First rumored to be ready by late 2018, then given an official release date of Summer 2020, those times have come and gone and the book is unreleased. Though he has shared chapters of the book. In 2022 he claimed to be "75% done". By extrapolation he should be done in 2026.
*''A Dream of Spring'' : Unreleased and unlikely to ever be.
** GRRM will most likely die before writing this, as he confirmed multiple times he hasn't even begun working on it and will only do so once he is done with Winds, though he has given an outline for how he wants the series to end that might be made public knowledge if he dies before the book series is finished.
*''The Dunk and Egg Series'': A story about a landless hedge knight travelling across Westeros with a Targaryen squire, so he can teach him how not to be an asshole to peasants. Consists of three small novels, with the fourth one being essentially ready (it was supposed to be published in a Dangerous Women anthology, but was shelved by Martin).
*''Fire and Blood'': Martin's Silmarillion (it even had a GRRMarillion working title at one point) that details the rule of Targaryen kings since the Conquest up until Robert's Rebellion. Only one tome, which abruptly ends on King Aegon III sixteen birthday, was relased, with the second one being released <s>never</s> after Winds of Winter.
**''Sons of the Dragon'': standalone chapter that was released 2 years before full FoF, detailing reigns of Aenys and Maegor.
**''Rogue Prince'': chapter about King Viserys' reign on which most of HOTD's Season 1 is based.
**''The Princess and The Queen'': chapter about Dance of Dragons (do not be confused with Dance ''with'' Dragons).

==On The "Grimdarkness" of the Setting==

One important note: While the setting is usually held to be "Grimdark", it is also very true to Real Life in its nastiness, with real consequences for assholes. George himself has said, quote; "No matter how much I make up, there's stuff in history that's just as bad, or worse." Book one is almost exactly the beginning of the War of the Roses, except with England enlarged to a continent's size and the seasons stretched out to let the travel times work. (...And then the dragons wake up, the ice elves and their undead armies return and magic makes a comeback. It's not a perfect analogy. All that stuff is closed in their own sub plots and they don't involve the main continent in the book, that is left to "common" war and plotting.)

For an example of Grimdark, but with consequences: The King can order the execution of the head of the leading noble family of the North, for essentially no reason, but now he doesn't have hostages to exchange when their relatives and/or armies come after him seeking revenge. (And all this is modeled on various occasions where more or less '''exactly''' this kind of thing happened in real life medieval Europe.)

In other words: Truly heinous shit goes on, and there's nothing ''stopping'' that kind of shit... but there are ''consequences'' to that kind of shit that act as an effective counterbalance against being seen to do that kind of shit to the smarter nobles in the kingdom. And, because anyone can die, the shittiest characters are no more guaranteed survival than the nicest.

Also worth mentioning that there's reason to think that, despite the quote that began this page, the series may not actually end on [[The End Times|100% downer note]], as Martin has said he hopes his series will end in a way akin to the Scouring of the Shire from Lord of the Rings, which, despite the name, is more of a bittersweet ending. So who knows (though this also presumes the author will actually get around to finishing the series at all).

In sum, whether the setting fully qualifies for "Grimdark" is a matter for debate. Probably the best way of looking at is that it is Grimdark, but in a nuanced way.

==See Also==
*[[/tg/ Song of Ice and Fire Houses]]
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U7NpSubAJQ Weiner, Weiner weiner]

[[category: Literature]]