Horizon Wars Beta v0.02 - Elite Edition

See attached, as promised.

It's not the document I was hoping to give you in some respects. I wanted it to be closer to finished-finished whereas this is still, very much, um, not finished. But the more I went over both the notes from the Mech edition of the beta and my own cross-checking, the more bits of the last version I found that just weren't quite done.

So although this isn't nearly as finished as I wanted it to be, it is a good deal more finished that the one I released to the Mechs back in September. It's got CQB rules fleshed out. It's got strategic assets. It's got missions... kinda. It's got one mission. And a start on a couple of others. Seriously, there are places in this document where you'll find that a section just stops in the middle of a sentence, so just... bear with that, OK?

It's also got the start to some fiction and setting content. Not as much as I've written, but I'm still juggling the question of tone. There's no denying that Zero Dark, while it stuck loosely to the satirical origins of the original Horizon Wars, went in a more serious and (pun not intended) darker direction and I have to acknowledge that my own hopes and expectations for the future have been affected by the last seven years to the point that I can't write "Britain accidentally starts the End of the World! Lol!" with my tongue quite so firmly in my cheek as it once was. The British invasion of France in Horizon Wars feels weirdly close to last year's invasion of Ukraine by the Putin regime both in terms of how double-thinky and surreal it has all felt, but also in terms of how easily it could have pulled the globe into a nuclear conflict. And although I think the risk of this is pretty low, now, it's sufficiently not off the table that - for someone raised during the Cold War in a military family - it's got some nasty echoes.

Territorial claims around the globe - from Russia, to China, to Serbia and elsewhere - increasingly make the fictional British claim on the fourteenth century demesne of the Plantagenet dynasty look almost feasible.

Consequently, I'm trying to take things slow in my treatment of the setting. I'm trying to find new angles on current events that aren't just hopelessly bleak but which still fit in with the Whoops Apocalypse style of the original.

That cold I mentioned last time is really, really not wanting to shift. I basically spent the whole of my Christmas holiday in various stages of being ill and tomorrow I go back to work and I'm still bloody ill. And there's a new train strike. So at least, hopefully, I have a good excuse to stay home for the rest of the week and work there instead of being dragged into the office. As soon as I can get through a sentence without a coughing fit, I'll get some videos done. Got two scripted, including the CMON one.

I've not been all that present on the Discord, lately, but I'll be on there a lot more for the next few weeks. There's some interesting news in the industry that's come out over the break, so I'll be curious to see your thoughts as well as feedback on the latest draft.