The World Folders

Now I'll go into the folders I use to support the world my characters live in. CENT, CIRC, SPHERE, all have the following folders:

NAVY - for all the Navy characters not currently in an ephermis..

MARINES – for the Marine and ground force characters not currently in an ephermis.

These two folders have the following sub-folders inside:

SLATED - which contains those former subordinates who have done well enough to be "slated for independent command" in the next ephermis that comes up.

RECRUITS - which contains characters picked up from other ephermi. One of the advertizing points a service will use with a client is that they can hire away any successful military heroes of the client and therefore relieve that client of any political unrest that might result from a war hero being left with time on his hands.

CIRC, for example, has a number of characters with names and statistics generated from my playing of UFO: Enemy Unknown. This is another neat way of having characters with back stories. It also provides for some interesting historical characters. One Alexander of Pella (aka "Alexander the Great) is currently awaiting his first ephermis in the employ of CIRC. He found there were plenty of worlds left to conquer after all. CENT has picked up a number of famous Confederate brigadiers from its American Civil War ephermis.

A LIMBO folder. This is a punishment folder for characters who have failed their missions. Their records have been stamped with something like "transferred to an obscure administrative center on Fleabite VII in the Far, Far Away Sector."

This makes for characters who are extremely motivated to take on assignments that few other characters are willing to taken on voluntarily. While many mercs are more than willing to take on comfortable, high technology ephermi like the ones code-named "Alpha Centauri," and "Supreme Commander," very few mercs are willing to take on uncomfortable, low-technology ephermi like those codenamed "Civilization" (where they start out with a few cave men in a cave), or "Medieval Total War" (where underwear is just starting to be invented). Succeeding at a lousy assignment is one way to get out of the limbo. Resigning from a service is another.

A PRISON folder. This is a ratcheting up of punishment. Sometimes a failure or an infraction is so criminal that a prison term is imposed. As the mercs tend to say of their employers, "Tis' a hard service."

So each service has its own notorious prison planet. CIRC's prison is called "Leavenworth." And it has a legendary section know as "the durance pile." CENT's prison planet is known as Devil’s World. SPHERE calls their's Sing Sing.

A sentence to these planets is usually "indeterminate," because a prisoner leaves only if the prison planet's owning service has a shortage of mercs for a contract, or a Service's intelligence arm needs a "dirty dozen" for an assignment.

An intelligence org folder. Each of the services has an intelligence and covert ops organization.

CIRC's is know as CIRCUIT. CENT's is know as CENTERPOINT or POINT for short. SPHERE's is known as INFLUENCE for FLU for short (its enemies, POINT and CIRCUIT, call them "the sneezies " because of that.) .

They recruit primarily from their service's military prisons because the inmates have not only military training, but are also motivated and have learned skills in prison that are useful in intelligence work. And some times what really got a merc in prison was being able to think outside the military box.

They also tend to recruit independents because it gives them an ear in various ephermi. CIRCUIT, for example, has recruited a number of independent mercs from a ephermis code named "Jagged Alliance 2." First person shooter ephermi like those codenamed "Bioshock," "Farcry" are also a fruitful sort of intelligence recruits.

A Command folder. Each service tries to minimize its HQ overhead, but certain offices cannot be done without. So the Command folder has sub folders in it for the following offices:

Commander in Chief

Chief of Naval Operations.

Marine Corps Commandant

Director General of Intelligence.

These command offices double as the marketing arm of the services as well as being administrators of the contracts. The first three involve overt marketing. The DGI's handle the covert marketing. Hence, only the best of the mecs reach these offices as the cream rises to the top with promotion in rank.

The CinC is typically the highest ranking officer in the service. The Chief of Naval Operations is the highest ranking naval officer. The Marine Corps Commandant is the highest ranking ground force commander. And the DGI is the highest ranking intelligence officer.

If a merc is promoted to a rank as high as the current holder of a command office, then the current holder of the office is required to step down in favor of the new candidate. The former holder of the office can then retire, or stay in and hope for an assignment and promotion that will allow a regain of the office, or even obtaining the office of CinC. But this is rare, as there are few conflicts that require the services of an extremely high rank.

These offices make for a certain amount of interesting politicking amongst the characters, and gives the characters something to shoot for. So it’s fun to have this overhead in my game playing.

A RETIRED folder. Yes, some mercs actually survive long enough to retire. This is where the ex-office holders wind up, as well as mercs who have made enough money and are no longer enthralled by combat.

It’s also the dumping ground of flag officers (admirals and generals) who have screwed up. One of the sources of cynicism in the Services is that they cannot generally afford the bad publicity of a flag officer being executed or tossed in prison for failing a mission. So flag officers are usually quietly retired after a contract goes bad.

They join the pool of retired mercenaries from all of the services who are members of a retirement organization know as the Old Soldiers and Sailors (OSS). Less respectfully, they are also known as "the fadies" (as in Gen. Douglas MacArthur's retirement speech "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.") The OSS tends to be the majority stock holder in all three of the Services.

While all the members of each service are answerable to their service command officer, and the command officers are answerable to their commander in chief, the commanders in chief are answerable only to the majority stockholders of their Service, which practically speaking, is the OSS.

A Cemetery folder. All three of the Services maintain their own Cemetery planets. CIRC's is called Arlington. CENT's is called Necropolis. And SPHERE's is called Boothill. All three cemetary planets have Junior Officer plots and Senior Officer plots.

Arlington has a special section called Valhalla, where it heroes are buried. It also has a garbage dump called "Treason Ground" where the bodies of executed traitors are unceremoniously dumped.

CENT's Necropolis has a sort ancient Egyptian theme to it, and has a special section called the Hall of Honor for its heroes.

SPHERE has absolutely no respect for its dead. The typical SPHERE merc believe a dead merc is a loser. Hence the name of its cemetery is Boot Hill, taken from the American Old West ("here lies so-and-so, the second fastest gun in Cochise County”).

A Women's Corp folder. I've been using "he" and "his" a lot, but the services all have women members too. But this is not something the Services are totally comfortable with. The main reason is that the services find it easier to recruit from low tech ephermi where the sudden absence of a bunch of people is unlikely to be noticed. Low tech ephermi tend to be populated by traditional societies with traditional ideas about gender roles. Hence the services tend to be slanted towards traditionalists of various sorts.

The services once recruited women willy-nilly, and found it didn't work out well with the great body of the troops. Too many instances of men breaking discipline to "rescue" the women. So the consensus now is that the services will only recruit women who are already part of a military. I.e., they'll be picked up from clients who are willing to let them go.

For the most part, women have done well in the intelligence services, and not just as Mata Hari's either. But that said, in the process of my gaming, the major CinC's of CIRC and CENT have turned out to be women.

Until very recently, CIRC's Commander in Chief was Admiral of the Fleets Patricia Drake. She is a descendent of Sir Frances Drake of Elizabethan fame, she holds the Order of Death's Head (4th degree), has a win/loss reputation of 18-0, and has a networth of $118,075,016. Unfortunately, she was recently deposed after CIRC failed twice in a ephermis code named "Soulstorm" (something about a moon called Nanyanoi held by the Tau Empire).

CENT's Commander in Chief is Admiral of the Fleets Morgan Katterhenry. Her win/loss reputation is 7-0, but only because a lot of her early work was done "off registry" before CENT was really organized (Her past is rather murky. She seems to have come from an ephermis in which the English privateer Henry Morgan was never born, and in which she was a lady Pirate of the Caribbean.) She has a net worth of $218,543,958.

Finally, I have ephermi folders. For each service organization I have a folder open for each ephermi which has service mercs participating in it. I am usually at various stages in various games. Some games, like the campaign games of Total War series, take so long that I lose interest in them and need to come back to them at a later time to finish them.

So, this is my game world, and the files and folders that make it up.

Next time: What is my ultimate goal?