The Great War never ended. Its relentless grind stretches across generations, a cancerous conflict that has consumed the world and left an indelible scar upon the very earth itself.

This is a perpetual struggle for dominance, fought on a scale unheard of in human history. Nations and Empires, once vibrant and hopeful, now stand as hollowed-out titans, their vast armies clashing across ravaged continents. At the heart of every bloody front stand the Shells, armored colossi of steel and fire, each a gargantuan testament to a nations might. These iron behemoths rampage across battlefields the world over, carving the very landscape with cannon, blade and armored fist. They are the ultimate arbiters of this endless war, engines of unparalleled destruction reshaping the very landscape with every brutal engagement.

From the soot-choked fortress cities of western Europe to the grinding quagmire of the Eastern Front, from the frozen wastes of the Siberian Offensive to the sun blasted hellscape of North Africa. A cycle of relentless offensives and desperate defenses, where technology, honed into instruments of unprecedented devastation, serves only to prolong the agony.

This is a world where heroism is measured in inches of blood-soaked ground gained and untold thousands of lives brutally spent. Where every breath is tinged with the dust of millions long dead and the acrid stench of battle. Where the future is not a promise, but a continued, agonizing fight for survival. There is no end in sight, only an unceasing march towards an uncertain, yet undoubtedly brutal, tomorrow.

Welcome to the front line soldier.

>You awaken in....

>A crowded troop transport, the airship lurching in the wind as it comes in for a landing. Thank God, you're airsick (USA)

>Slouched against a crumbling bunker wall, the distant rumble of artillery fire making the rubble shiver (French)

>Sleep? You weren't sleeping. You were resting your eyes for a moment. It's almost time for tea after all (British)

>Rolling out of your bunk, deep beneath the secure walls of an artillery fortress. Awake awake, the Kaiser calls. (German)

>Sleep? Czars balls you haven't slept in days. It's too cold to sleep. Besides, the sirens are going off again the(Russian)

>>6271242 (OP)
>Slouched against a crumbling bunker wall, the distant rumble of artillery fire making the rubble shiver (French)

>>6271242 (OP)
>>A crowded troop transport, the airship lurching in the wind as it comes in for a landing. Thank God, you're airsick (USA)

World War One that never ended with mechs? Sign me up.

>>6271242 (OP)
>>Slouched against a crumbling bunker wall, the distant rumble of artillery fire making the rubble shiver (French)

>>6271242 (OP)
>Slouched against a crumbling bunker wall, the distant rumble of artillery fire making the rubble shiver (French)

>Russian
Here's to a world where the last great monarchs didn't fall to the machinations of money.

Feel free to drop a post on the new /QTG/ to get more voters.

Captcha: DYKW8

>>6271242 (OP)
>Rolling out of your bunk, deep beneath the secure walls of an artillery fortress. Awake awake, the Kaiser calls. (German)

>>6271242 (OP)
>>A crowded troop transport, the airship lurching in the wind as it comes in for a landing. Thank God, you're airsick (USA)
I have to. USA USA U S A

>>6271242 (OP)
>Sleep? Czars balls you haven't slept in days. It's too cold to sleep. Besides, the sirens are going off again the(Russian)

>Slouched against a crumbling bunker wall, the distant rumble of artillery fire making the rubble shiver (French)

>>6271242 (OP)
>Rolling out of your bunk, deep beneath the secure walls of an artillery fortress. Awake awake, the Kaiser calls. (German)

>>6271258
>>6271268
>>6271278
>>6271343

>France.

They shall not pass.

That was the mantra beaten into the very souls of every fresh recruit that cycled into any one of the hundreds of drill camps scattered throughout Frances bloodied soil. A motto, a prayer, a oath of defiance against numberless hordes of man and machine. A promise to defend the heartland to your very last bullet, the last scrap of ground, the last drop of blood in your veins.

They shall not pass.

From the trench fortresses and redoubts of the Somme-Marne Wall that stretch for hundreds of kilometres across once serene countrysides to the Alpine Bastions, eternally guarding the southern flank against the foes of France. French soldiers march and fight and die, win or lose, scrabbling like brawling animals in the ruins of shattered cities. But no matter how many fall, no matter how dark the night, no matter fear or pain or death.

>They Shall Not Pass. You will not retreat. You will not falter. You refuse to give in to despair or weariness or pain, struggling through to fight on with renewed ferocity (+15 to Combat checks If Health drops below 50%)

The distant rumble of artillery fire sends dust trickling from fractures in the bunkers ceiling, loose stones tapping gently on the floor. Regular as clockwork, distant rumbles, closer rumbles, closer rumbles, distant rumbles. Incoming, outgoing. Hostile fire. Friendly fire. Near misses. Direct hits. Gas. Fire. Screaming.

>>6271495
You blink your eyes open, forcing the exhaustion induced nightmare back as you sit up straight, stiff muscles protesting as you move. It's cold down here, so cold you can almost see your breath and moisture condenses and trickles from rusted pipes and hairline cracks, oozing down the walls and pooling anywhere it possibly can. The only illumination inside the slab walled former supply cache comes from a dim, faintly blinking bulb screwed into the ceiling directly above the door. Out in the corridor, the next light source is nearly twenty paces down, flickering feebly, almost in tune with the endless rumbling. Wiping your hand across your eyes you push yourself to your feet, thats likely all the sleep you're going to get. Glancing around the room, strewn with chunks of concrete, detritus, trash and vermin, you can almost glean a snapshot of its history. This room, a simple reinforced supply cache located deep within the bowels of Redoubt Saint-Claire was built decades before your birth and had been everything from barracks room to morgue in the years between. You sincerely doubted you'd be the last man to sleep poorly inside it.

The ground rumbles.

Your feet slap wetly against the slick concrete beneath your boots as you make your way upward, through the sloping, switchbacking central corridor that makes up the vulnerable innards of Redoubt Saint-Claire. The dimly buzzing bulbs pulsing faintly every thirty paces, illuminating your shadow before and behind you in weak strobelight. The rumble grows louder the higher you ascend in the bunker complex, passing ammunition depots and autoloader racks that clunk slowly along the walls beside you, bearing the enormous shells to feed the field mortar batteries.

You pass huddled groups of other French soldiers. Some stare blankly into the darkness, hollow cheeked, hollow eyed. Some count off dogtags in solemn chants, archiving the fallen. Few look at you for long, none offering little more than a nod. You don't blame them, Shell pilots were seen differently by the infantry. Sure you were all on the same side but near everyone had seen the aftermath of a Shell turning men into paste like they were swatting a fly. Especially disheartening was when it was a friendly pilot who had lost control of their metallic steed, it's primitive machine mind running berserk.

>>6271496
No matter, they have their job to do and you have yours. The rumbling grows louder with every meter you advance up the sloping tunnel, daylight, thin and greasy grasping it's way into the gloom. You can hear the chatter of voices, the low belch of machinery, the chest rattling rumbles of incoming artillery fire, the staccato thud of an autocannon, the screams and cries of the wounded being borne into the safety of the bunker depths.

Looks like it's going to be an eventful morning...

>Who are you? I'll leave this open for a bit, sorry about the delay I had a more eventful day than I was expecting. Feel free to suggest character ideas and background, if you have any questions feel free to ask. If you'd rather I just throw up some preplanned characters to choose from, let me know.

>>6271497
Uhhhhhh fuggin
>Henri D'Artois, orphan from the region of the same name, spent his childhood roaming streets and doing odd mechanical work such as a kid could, like fixing things in small spaces, his aptitude and proclivity for machinery got him where he is when he enlisted/got drafted/pressganged.
Maybe he knows some criminals from his days as a disreputable urchin, maybe not. I don't know. Could be he got arrested for some bullshit. Could be he joined the army to get away from a shit life. Or he's just a patriot.

>>6271497
>Marwan Al'Said

The third son of the Al'Said tribe which retained some modicum of power and privilege in Algeria through French colonialism. He was sent along to the front with a few family retainers (that have since died or assigned elsewhere) as a way to curry favor with the French government.

His noble background afforded him the privilege of being a Shell pilot but little else.

>>6271497
>Nathanaël Jérémie Mathieu Dorian de Évreux. A son of a once proud aristocratic family that was left in ruin after the revolution, and had been reduced to an aging manor in the Pyranees. His rugged upbringing in the mountains made him suited for a role in the Chasseurs Alpins, though his aristocratic lineage and isolated home may give off a bad impression for the more metropolitan and revolutionary minded individuals.

>>6271497
>Jan-Baptist Goethals
A remnant of the Belgian army subsumed into the French lines. He has no home to return to on leave, no family he can contact, almost no nation save for thin sliver of decimated land on the front lines. In the end what he fights for is a dream to return to a Belgium free of German occupation, and the slim possibility that the home and family he has been separated so long from might still be there.

how are the Ottomans, Italians, Austro-Hungarians, and Serbs faring? Is King Albert still around?

>Jan-Baptist Goethals

>>6271611
Last I heard, Albert was in a can.

I'll back Henri D'Artois or Nathanaël Jérémie Mathieu Dorian de Évreux. Pauper or Prince, as long as we're truly a Frenchman.

>>6271504
+1

>>6271504
+1

Jan-Baptist is cool too.

>>6271611
The Ottomans are sided with the Mechanized Empire of Bismark along with the Italians. The Iron Sultanate controls most of the middle east and a sizeable chunk of North and eastern Africa, backed up by German forces, waging a back and forth conflict against Entente and American forces. Austrio-Hungary has been conglomerated into the Bismark Empire along with most of eastern Europe, constantly contesting territory with the Czarist forces.

>>6271504
>Henri D'Artois takes it by a nose

You don't remember much of your early childhood to be honest. Sister Jeanne had always told you that your parents had been brave and had loved you very much. Simple lies for simple children. You'd figured out very quickly that your nightmares of sizzling flesh and chemical stink were all the answers you needed. A unlucky day for an unlucky family had seen you in an orphanage alongside hundreds of other war orphans. You'd stayed busy long enough to figure out that you wanted nothing to do with that nonsense and had escaped onto the streets, weaseling into the alleys, sewers and tunnel complexes of Arras like a feral animal. You stole. You scratched. You fought for every weevil ridden ration bar, every drink of chem reeking water. You'd eventually taken up with a gang of scrappers, dismantling destroyed machinery, generators, vehicles, you still remembered the first time your gang had come across a German HimmelsJäger crashed in the ruins of a mortar bunker. That was the first time you'd ever worked on a Shell and it had lit a fire in your soul. The pilot had needed to be scraped off of the interior cabin but you'd still been enthralled by the fallen machine, it's Aetherium generator still sparking with blue-violet arcs, it's casing cracked and the ozone reek filling the air. That glow had fascinated you in a way you couldn't explain.

The bounty of the fallen shell had fed your gang for weeks and you'd taken to your work with gusto, pushing yourself to the limit, crawling into the bellies of manufactory machinery, wiggling through conduit lines, up to your neck in unspeakable foulness replacing filter components. Saving every Franc you earned until you had enough, enough to pay forgers for papers and a ticket for an armored train, leaving your old life behind for the dream of Steel.

Stepping through the vast armored doors of Camp Sanglier, you knew instantly that THIS was what you were meant to do. It had been long, hard months. Harder than anything you'd ever done and each day was harder than the day before. Extreme physical conditioning, sleep deprivation, live fire exercises, endless hours of lectures on strategic theory, mechanical principles, hand to hand training, weapons training, heavy weapons training, sensory deprivation, performing emergency repairs in complete darkness, under fire, under gas attack. All that and more had paled in comparison to the final steps of your journey. The procedures to enable your bond with the machine soul of a Shell were.... Gruesomely painful, your mind still shys away from the grating sound of drills on bone, a tooth vibrating buzz and the scent of burning bone. The electroshock headaches of the infusions, refined Aetherium pumped into your veins in microdoses, fusing with your nerves and synapses so that the bio-mechanical connection didn't boil your mind out of your ears, so the sensory input didn't drive you irreparably mad.

>>6271830
You can't say that it didn't come with benefits however. Your reflexes and physical conditioning were superior in almost every way to most men. You were mentally toughened, resilient beyond the concepts of fear and dismay. Most importantly, you could bond with a Shell, the cranial probe syncing your mind to the Shell, subjecting it to your will. You saw what it saw. You felt what it felt. It's weapons were your weapons. Its armor, your skin. The moment you'd first stepped into a Lancier had been the proudest of your life, the feeling of its predatory consciousness lurking behind your own eyes, feeling it's systems respond to your every thought, the heavy *clunk* of its autocannon loaders cycling as you flexed your fingers, the immense shearing claw on its other arm snapping shut with hydraulic strength as you clenched your fist. The deep throaty growl of its engine rumbling in your chest as you took your first step as a true Shell Pilot.

Camp Sanglier had been years ago however and your first years of service had been remarkably uneventful, lulls in the near endless Bismarkian offensives allowing your countrymen a brief breath, repairing, rebuilding, refortifying. You'd been stationed deep behind friendly lines for the most part, operating a Chasseur Mk7. You'd been little more than a glorified piece of construction equipment for the better part of two years, moving cargo and hauling aside debris armed with nothing more than your steel fists. But word had come down of troop movements along the former border with Belgium and you'd been reassigned. Still in a Chasseur, nothing like the mighty Lancier you'd piloted to prove your worth, almost exactly like the simple training models you'd cut your teeth on. But still, at least this one came armed.

You emerge from the sloping tunnel, nodding briefly to the guards at each side. One of them returns your nod, the other stares into the distance, idly rubbing a shell casing between two fingers. The sky above is a murky swirl of greasy clouds, choked by smog and smoke, the sun a weak pale disc barely visible behind them. The vast central yard is nearly deserted save for scattered handfuls of artillery crews and mortar teams working their guns with steady efficiency. The thick walls of Redoubt Saint-Claire rise twenty meters on each side, their multilayered surface scored and pocked by incoming artillery fire. You know that most of the Redoubt is subterranean, the trench networks and pillboxes accessible by narrow tunnels stretching like a spiderweb underfoot. You duck your head as a incoming shell slams into the fortifications overhead, sending a spray of rubble and dust across the courtyard.

They're feeling lucky today it seems.

>>6271832
The Germans have so far been content to sit across the ridge from the Redoubt, lobbing shells at each other almost lazily, usually only increasing their efforts when one of their troop trains or supply convoys makes its way along the narrow roadway, that one strategic channel being the sole reason that unknown thousands of men have given their lives over this narrow valley. You don't know what their reasoning is, all you know for sure is that you are hearing a LOT more small arms fire than you usually do and the gun crews are moving with far more haste. This may just wind up being an exciting day after all.

>Head to the command bunker immediately and get up to date on the situation. The Colonel will know where to send you.

>Head straight to the Shell depot. You want to get your Chasseur ready and get into the fight as quickly as you can. They can reach you by radio if they need to.

>Get straight to the armory. Youre a shell pilot but you'll be damned if you face a Bismarkian assault with nothing but your pistol and a bad attitude.

>Other

>>6271833
>>Head to the command bunker immediately and get up to date on the situation. The Colonel will know where to send you.

Orders first.

Also, what's up with America? Why haven't they just steamrolled Bismark by dint of having their industry and people not on the same continent?

Do you guys trusts these ai/human text analizer sites?

>>6271897
How queer, the first entry ticks as machine-made in three different sites (and does looks like one) but the following updates appear as man-made (or human written)

>>6271833
>>Head to the command bunker immediately and get up to date on the situation. The Colonel will know where to send you.
It wouldn't do to go the wrong way once we get into our Shell because the orders have us doing something else.

I do hope we'll see the other proposed characters sometime though. They're pretty cool sounding.

>A R M O R Y
i want to see the guns

>>6271896
Good question! America has largely served as logistical support and a arms supplier for the Entente for decades but after their expansion to annex Canada and most of Mexico they entered into a war with the Central and South American Coalition (CSAC) who, after suffering heavy losses entered into a alliance with The MEB. Shortly afterwards, Czarist forces crossed the Bering strait and engaged American forces, seeing large temporary gains before being pushed back into Russian territory in what is now known as the Siberian Offensive.

Where did Baron Roman Nikolai Ungern von Sternberg, the Bloody Baron, the White Khan, end up in all this? Also, Japan & China?

>>6272013
Didnt even consider him but hell yeah, S-tier historical character. We'll say he conquered large parts of Mongolia for the Czar and was killed in action fighting Chinese forces. China, Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Japan, ETC are all members of the Pan-Pacific Alliance. Australia, NZ, India and large parts of Africa are controlled by Britain and France with their own localized battlefronts/insurgency groups. The USA engages in minor skirmishes with Pan-Pacific forces occasionally over Pacific territory but neither side wants to divert their attention to a full blown conflict between the two.

>>6272030


So who are the factions at play now? You mentioned the Tzar is still around, but what is the MEB?

>>6272030
Also sorry about the blank square misclicked.

>>6271833
>Head to the command bunker immediately and get up to date on the situation. The Colonel will know where to send you.

>>6271833
>Head straight to the Shell depot. You want to get your Chasseur ready and get into the fight as quickly as you can. They can reach you by radio if they need to.

>>6271833
>Head to the command bunker immediately and get up to date on the situation. The Colonel will know where to send you.

Alright Archivist, give us an update or the Bloody Baron will surely tell the Great Tengri not to allow you into the Blue Heavens.