Firestorm (series)

Firestorm is a series of  and  created by Black Sands Entertainment. The series is set during an alternate 21st and 22nd centuries, and its "cassettepunk" aesthetic are influenced by mid-to-late 20th Century East Alutran culture, with a combination of optimism for radical social change intertwined the pervasive fear of a  following the events of the Third World War and the increasing fragility of the postwar international system. The game is primarily set in the Serpentine Valley of East Alutra, though future expansions of the original game and subsequent entries to the series have brought more of the continent into the setting.

The series' eponymous first entry was released in 2004 by Black Sands, which saw subsequent releases of the Sands of Time and Deserts of Glass expansion packs in 2005 and 2006, respectively. [Section on games released in the series between 2006 and 2016]. In 2016, Black Sands was joined by Lathadun developers Laaghey Studios to modernize the original game, creating Firestorm: Blackest Wastes, which expands the scope of the setting from the Serpentine Valley into portions of the former Sedic nations. Considered officially to be an expansion pack similar to SoT and DoG, many in the series' fandom differentiate between "Classic" and "Blackest" versions of the game.

While the of the game is owned by Black Sands, the studio has released the developers kit and a number of assets from both versions of the original Firestorm game to the public, owing to a vibrant community of  that has grown around the series since its creation in 2004. The game also enjoys a large competitive scene, with Firestorm tournaments taking place across the world, generally having evolved out the East Alutran culture.

Origins
According to series creators [DEV NAMES], the series has its roots in the pen-and-paper system Glasslands and the cooperative strategy board game Shelter, which were published in the late 1980s. The former has the players take the role of characters living in a post-apocalyptic landscape, in which players act as morally-ambiguous explorers, scavengers, and mercenaries. The latter is a game where players are military figures constructing, populating, and defending an underground bunker complex from a hostile forces while managing the internal politics and resources needed to keep the complex safe and maintained.

Firestorm initially began as an attempt to create two separate games based on each of these systems during in 1998-99, though budget concerns and limits to the company's existing Sandbox Engine architecture made the series' longtime Creative Lead [CREATIVE LEAD NAME], who was working on the Glasslands project at the time, propose a merger of the games and a shift of the layout from their original three-dimensional action RPG concept and Shelter's two-dimensional "ant farm" layout into an isometric overhead perspective. This was owing to the contemporary success of similar strategy games using this perspective that was popular across the worldwide gaming community in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The series was originally set to exist in the base setting of Glasslands, but recent developments in the Brotherly Wars which wracked the developers' home region for decades, [specific event(s)], spurred [CREATIVE LEAD] to create a more politically vocal message for the game. This has been summarized by the series' recurring tagline: "Must the son pay for the sins of his father?" The move was initially criticized by Black Sands, though [Creative Lead] has gone on to state that the original intention of the game was "to deliver a hopeful tone, that even in moments of incomprehensible darkness and inhumanity...that people can always redeem themselves and bring each other from the edge...but that peace and prosperity are a fragile thing to be cherished and protected."

Radiant system
The Radiant system is a mechanic that was developed specifically for an in the Firestorm series. It is composed of five base statistics: Physical, Body, Mental, Spirit, and Social. The system has its roots in the character creation mechanic that was employed in the original Glasslands, which was one of the two primary inspirations for the series.

There are three dimensions to the Radiant System, which affect the character's abilities in both the posse and polity-level aspect of gameplay:
 * Attributes: These are the base five statistics mentioned above. They change relatively little throughout the game, though they can temporarily be affected by consumables such as food, drugs, or environmental hazards, or indefinitely by things like specialized equipment, injuries, or by the presence of certain NPCs and the makeup of your posse. Beyond the player character, each other NPC in the environment (including those not capable of joining a posse) has randomly-assigned attributes which affect how the player is able to interact with or combat that character. The release of Blackest Wastes tweaked this to be procedurally generated, so that no one encounter (outside of the game's narrative) is repeated between playthroughs.
 * Skills: These are capacities unlocked by the character that represents the ability to perform certain tasks or use specific equipment, such as being able to fire a gun, pick a lock, or interface with computers. The character achieves the ability to perform these tasks by achieving a minimum score in one of the base attributes, and then establishes the baseline percentage chance of success in performing that skill. The player generally can improve these scores by successfully performing the skill, though the base percentage can be set higher by assigning skill points that the player achieves through acquiring experience. Firestorm is unique among similar games in its genre in that these skills can also slowly degrade over time if the character does not perform them, incentivizing the player to make each character specialize into certain tasks. The rate of degradation in skill efficacy is determined by the character's Mental stat.
 * Synergies: Synergies are passive abilities which arise from the playstyle of each character that are areas where the five base stats overlap. These include Hardiness (Physical+Body), Tactics (Physical+Mental), Resilience (Physical+Spirit), Presence (Physical+Social), Coordination (Body+Mental), Tenacity (Body+Spirit), Grace (Body+Social), Awareness (Mental+Spirit), Mentorship (Mental+Social), and Leadership (Spirit+Social). As the player invests attribute and skill points, the corresponding synergies also improve. These provide ambient benefits to the posse, or to the polity if they are a leader. For instance, a character with a high Mentorship synergy can either grant other members of the posse access to a skill that they have at a lower percentage, or improve the technology skills of a polity, while a character with a high Tactics synergy could improve the posse's ability to control a battlefield, while on the polity level this improves the efficacy of defenses and soldiers. This encourages the player to consider a the benefits and drawbacks of a playstyle as a specialist to improve skills compared to a more jack-of-all-trades approach that improves synergies.

Posse
The posse phase refers to gameplay which focuses on small-scale, squad-based gameplay, where the character and their companions (the "posse") explores and interacts with the environment, engages in combat, and/or interfaces with NPCs. This was modeled on the general experience of a Glasslands game. This is generally considered (PvE) gameplay in the base version of the game, though it has become a centerpiece of  (PvP) gameplay with the rise of Firestorm tournaments in the following years.

In the original Firestorm, this was limited to the group which follows the player character during exploration of the world space and engaging in both narrative and non-narrative quests. Non-playable posses were assigned to caravans engaging in resource harvesting, trade, and skirmishes, though these were entirely automated in the original game. The Sands of Time expansion added the option to have the player directly control skirmishes and explorations, which can potentially allow for victories which would be less likely if automated, as well as the opportunity for the player to explore more of the game's environments and acquire resources and items that might have not been found, though this does also confer additional risks that were not present in automated instances as well.

Polity management
The polity management phase of gameplay focuses on macro-scale administration, maintenance, and expansion of the player's territories on the world map, a or -style experience. These also have narrative quests, which unlike the posse, is based on text-based popups that emerge in regards to the actions of the player both in terms of actions taken in the posse phase, as well as the administrative choices that the player makes in choosing how the polity and its settlements develop. This is a turn-based system, where the player has a certain number of actions they can take per turn in accord to the outputs of the polity being managed. During this time, the player uses their actions to assign citizens to projects (typically construction, trade, research, resource harvesting, training, or combat), coordinate industry to develop infrastructure and buildings, and choose which research program and social project to undertake. During this phase, the player will have to decide between the short-term needs of the polity alongside the longer-term goals the player has in mind, which may be aided or confounded both by narrative events, random conditions, the actions of other factions in the world space, and the decisions the player makes in managing their polity.

The player can also automate portions of this element of gameplay through assigning a character to be a leader of a settlement within the polity, following the release of the Deserts of Glass expansion. Each leader has a management style which is affected by their Radiant stats, primarily their synergies, which dictates the general priorities for management and development those leaders will undertake in running the settlement. The player may still intercede in events, and must respond to narrative text-based choices directly, though taking a less direct role in your polity's affairs may cause your influence to waver within individual settlements, depending on your relationship with that particular leader compared to the influence of other factions in the vicinity of the polity. Leaders may include both narrative and non-narrative NPCs, and can be recalled to engage in a posse phase with the player or on a caravan mission, but the removal and replacement of leadership may cause temporary or long-term damage to yields in a settlement.

During each turn, the player can take any number of diplomatic actions engaging with other entities in the world space. This includes either promoting or combatting faction influence in your polity, exerting influence on other polities, signing treaties and agreements in regards to aid, defense, and trade, and knowledge-sharing. Diplomacy requires two types of investment in the group you engage with: an active caravan route (or a communications channel at higher technology levels) and a diplomatic mission. The former allows you to communicate and trade, allowing lower-level deals and exchanges, while the latter allows you to engage in more sophisticated treaties such as coordination of armies, research, or industrial development. In diplomacy, the player may exchange through direct barter of resources, lengths of copper wire (the game's currency), or through diplomatic favors. The frequency of trade and interaction between polities will change their stance with the player over time, causing them to become more amenable or hostile, and your polity's reputation with others will affect how you are perceived by other parties, and potentially opens up new options and experiences both narrative and non-narrative for the player.

Setting
Firestorm takes place in a fictionalized East Alutra in an scenario that diverges from reality during the Ordrish Revolution, where the conflict expands in 1980 following the arrival of Velorenkyan forces in Gladomyr in response of the Myrish invasion of the Mogone. As a result, the conflict dramatically enflames relations between the capitalist and radical nations, leading to an unspecified near-miss incident involving combat over Republic-era Ordrish nuclear weapons that causes an intervention by the World Forum to stop the conflict and restore the Ordrish border before other countries struggling with the era's economic malaise implode in the manner Ordrey did in 1975. The resulting disruption in global trade leads to the proliferation of nuclear energy around the world, feeling that the reliability of fossil-fuels based economies have come into question in an era of polarizing political tensions that could potentially interrupt the global fossil fuels trade once again. An "atomic golden age" begins as a result, with a strage socio-technological status quo emerging where advanced robotics, cars and other vehicles,, , the , and other technological marvels exist alongside  computers, , and. Meanwhile, the society saw increasing contrast between avant-garde and traditionalist modes of self-expression amid an environment of socio-political paranoia about the future. This also coincides with an intensification of the time's and the militarization of society, most notably in the Serpentine Valley.

The political tensions of the pre-war world culminate in an opening of outright hostility between Martland and Aquizreiki involving the deployment of tactical nuclear missiles, though it is uncertain who fired first. Following this, an unspecified Sedic nation (most likely Ordrey) was struck by one of the belligerents, which prompted a mass retaliation which included much higher-yield nuclear devices as well as space-based kinetic weapons. This in turn caused a cascade of geopolitical dominoes that sparked a massive conflict between the two main competing power blocs which remained intact and involved in the Brotherly Wars, causing a failure of the world economy, the immediate implosion of the international system and the World Forum, and a number of conflicts and uprisings the world over. This even is known in the setting as the "Seven-Hour War". The game's worldspace itself has not yet cross westward into the Alutran Steppe beyond the Penguinnes or north of the Aarnieu River, but item descriptions as well as some dialogue with non-player characters indicate that not every society had fallen, and there may still be continuing nations elsewhere in Alutra outside of the area explored in-game.

In the 2012 sequel to Firestorm entitled Firestorm: Peninsula, it is revealed that large portions of Koranel were bombed following the nation stepping into the war to support its allies in Alutra and elsewhere, leading to the decimation of society in most parts of Koranel, with the exception of the city of Domidy, where a failed hydrogen bomb lead to the remaining disarray of the Coranellan government to flee and hastily establish a semi-functional - albeit corrupt and in shambles - government-in-exile in the small city. The sequel also discloses that Riyude, Teleri Republic, Tiepu, and Ta'aroha faced similar fates, with several cities like Grana being stated in-game to be in complete ruins with a lack of any stable human habitation.

Pre-War conditions
[Creative lead] describes the world in 2071 as a "gilded age" where on the surface, people in East Alutra and the wider world lived in a period of technological wonders and personal freedom, but had lives built on foundations of social distress, political turmoil, the rise of nationalism and radicalization, and economic stagnation. Landmarks and items from the pre-war era found throughout the series appear to indicate a period, mentions of food and fuel shortages, the destabilization of numerous countries, worsening , and a culture that was failing to address its ills to the detriment of all within it. In the Serpentines, an atmosphere of pervasive violence carried on throughout the 21st Century, and very few areas were safe from ethnic or political strife. Most people would carry some form of personal protection, with the presence of in  that the player can salvage being a particularly shocking example of the pervasiveness of the ongoing Brotherly Wars, referred to as the "Always War" in-game. A sense of cynicism and disdain for institutions and authority in general can be seen the most strongly among characters who were adults which have clear memories of the pre-war world. Many of the most stable remaining buildings in the urban areas of the wastelands are veritable fortresses made of reinforced concrete in an apparent Neo-Fundadismist style, while some cities have areas which are cordoned off from each other by security perimeters and concrete walls, some of which have automated defenses such as robotic machine gun turrets.

Blackest Wastes began to show the worsening conditions for the wider world in the era, with the Sedic nations, which appeared to have unified under a government called the "Fraternity", had fallen behind other nations economically, as evident by a number of imported goods that can be found in the worldspace, with higher technology artefacts and items tending to indicate foreign design while domestic hardware seems to have stagnated. National Futurism appears to have displaced Noyonism on the national stage there, though a disproportionate numbers of avowedly Noyonist communities exist which claim to predate the conflict and have roots as far back as 1974. In contrast to much of the world following the divergence, Ordrey and Lathadu in particular appeared to have taken a path where development of energy still utilized the region's coal deposits, as evident in the presence of hyper-advanced coal-fired engines and a unique resource called "alphamen", described as a "high-efficiency liquefied coal fuel" which can be scavenged by the player and power some items and structures in the place of other energy sources.

Few references exist as to the state of the world outside of East Alutra prior to the Seven-Hour War. Among them include [REFERENCES TO WIDER WORLD]. [IMPLICATIONS].

Post-War conditions
Following the war, the Serpentine Valley and Alutra east of the Penguinnes faced significant devastation from nuclear strikes and the following dispersal of. The dispersal of ash into the atmosphere caused major cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, beginning a phase of. Most of the most deadly fallout and radiation had subsided roughly a month following the war, but the outright devastation of the regional infrastructure coupled with the pre-existing culture of tension and intergroup violence prevented any attempts at restoring order in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, with the majority of surviving military in the Serpentine Valley deserting. Over time, the surviving military forces would then lay the foundation for both many of the region's prominent factions as well as a number of hostile gangs. Three "organized" military factions appear in the Serpentines. The first, and most prominent, is the New Commonwealth Guard (NCG) - a multiethnic group which seeks to reunify the region as a whole and restore an idealized version of pre-war society. The second is the Regency, a neo-feudalistic group which took inspiration from the original Serpentine Commonwealth, and who style themselves using titles of nobility, and often wear steel armor reminiscent of trench armor from the First World War with medievalistic details inlaid upon them. The third is the Free Soldiery (often called the Hourglass), a Neo-Noyonist group which eschews reliance on historical narratives and has a defensive posture compared to other military-derived organizations, focusing largely on implementing a "revolutionary society" and clearing the lingering environmental damage from the war, as well as the lingering societal damages from the pre-war years. The three groups are in constant conflict with each other, and are generally considered the most powerful groups in the wasteland, having the highest degrees of organization and logistical capacity. A number of loose ethno-nationalist paramilitary organizations were able to establish small fiefdoms as well, which the three main organizations have attempted to either court or eliminate. Blackest Wastes introduced Sedic affiliates of all these major factions, with the artefact-obsessive Spiral acting as the counterpart to the Hourglass, the intellectual Jurists aligning with the NCG, and the authoritarian Teigians corresponding to the Regency.

Outside of the military groups which have links to pre-war society, a number of factions emerged in response to the radically different conditions of the wasteland. [Section on other major factions].

Post-war Ecology
Wildfires spread throughout the region, decimating many of the Valley's greenspaces, and with the nuclear winter which followed, the regrowth of vegetation was slowed. However, contrary to the original expectations by pre-war scientists, much of the Valley's ecosystem not just endured, but actually improved following the end of the phase of wildfires and nuclear winter. While the resulting irradiation contaminated many environments, the greatest ecological damage from the war came in the form of contamination of soil and water by industrial and chemical waste from power plants, factories, and sewage treatment facilities. As a result, many surface water sources were made unfit for use without substantial treatment or distillation. Populations of wild animals have rebounded significantly. Fungus and scavenger animals in particular have become more widespread, and carrion birds are a daily sight for survivors. Some life appears to have been affected by the environmental contamination and irradiation, becoming much more dangerous and sometimes hostile to humans. The most recognizable of these mutated lifeforms in the series include alterations of real-world animals such as the direrat, giant lamprey, radhog, ash wolf, bunkerfish (a mutated sturgeon with an extremely resilient hide), waste condor, and the lathemore (a species of great ape derived from which escaped from captivity). In addition, there are more fantastical animals rooted in regional folklore, including the deltawalker (a bipedal crocodilian sometimes seen using tools), the bloodthorn (an ambulatory blood-sucking plant believed to be derived from ), and the doyar (an amphibious canid).

In contrast to these greener environs, however, the regions which were inflicted by a direct hit by a nuclear weapon have become sterile, ecologically dead areas which have suffered from high degrees of, known colloquially by survivors as the "Glasslands". These often surround what were the highest-value targets to the opposing nations, including early warning systems, military and government command centers, communications infrastructure, and in some cases, cultural sites. As a result of the nature of the targets, they provide opportunities for the salvage of high-value equipment, materials, and machinery that are difficult or impossible to replicate post-war. However, these areas are also host to greater occurrence of mutated wildlife, as well as hazardous irradiated "shard storms", which can lacerate most unshielded organic material and damage many inorganic materials.