I recently started a Substack where I’ll be sharing a lot of the stuff I’ve never published and don’t yet have the bandwidth to prepare for proper book formatting or crowdfunding. There will be considerable crossover with articles here on Splendor of Fire, but the idea of putting them on Substack is that it has the potential to put way more eyes on it and possibly earn a bit of money. Due to the hostility of major Internet corporations to independent voices and anything operating outside of their platform, a hostility that is manifest most clearly in shadowbanning and their inscrutably arcane “algorithms”, it is extremely hard to get traction on an independent website like this. Substack, on the other hand, has a lot of eyeballs on it and has so far shown itself to be committed to both free speech and serving a marketplace of independent creators.

Rather than repost the entire article here, I’ll simply share the link. It is free to read.

In early 2021, I started buying Warlord Games’ Konflikt ‘47 miniatures, initially intending to use them for 40k-style sci-fi games, but rather quickly getting into the Weird WW2 idea for which they were originally intended. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get past the idea that the Axis could keep fighting into 1947, given their extreme disadvantage in terms of industry and fuel. Even having dieselpunk sci-fi tech doesn’t offer you a big advantage if you can’t actually build enough to equip your forces with it. Besides, the US, British, and Soviets all had weird tech, too. The officially published history struggled with this, as well. The war just seemed to drag on interminably, with a lot of words used to tell the tale of a lot of nothing happening on the frontline. Thus, I needed the Axis — Germany, in particular — to start the war in a stronger position, with more land and (especially) more oil. The answer for this was simple: Germany wins WWI. And the simplest, historically plausible way for the Central Powers to win WWI is for the US to remain neutral. And the most entertaining way I could think to explain the failure of progressive, imperialist elements from arising in the US was to posit a Confederate victory in the Civil War.

Because I wanted to accentuate the ‘weirdness’ of the setting, I decided the Germans should be getting most of their oil from their Antarctic colony of Neuschwabenland. But Vril-powered Haunebu II saucers launching out of polar glacier airbases wasn’t enough; there had to be dinosaurs.