The Order in Which This is Written is All Wrong
Between 14th and 25th August, 1914 the 1st and 2nd French armies, upright and resplendent in the red and blue of the infantry, marched against the 6th and 7th German armies in the disputed territory of Lorraine. This had been the way that armies had conducted themselves for centuries; a soldier was proud of his country and of his uniform, and above all he was visible. Visibility, amongst the mud and the powder smoke of nineteenth century combat was at a premium and telling friend from foe was prized over concealment. War was still waged on the open fields. Although smokeless ammunition and magazine fed firearms had been in use since the mid to late-1800s they had not seen major deployment on the battlefields of Europe. The men of the 1st and 2nd walked into the teeth of a new era; the automated fire of German machine gun emplacements chewed them up and swallowed them whole, the first tender morsels of the gluttonous feast that was the first world war.
The guillotine has the distinction of being one of the first truly modernist horrors. It was created to make those deaths which were deemed necessary as clean and predictable, as pain and fear free as possible. It resulted in a proliferation of death as it cut down the prerequisites that might make death the least of all options. Death becomes easy, and bureaucracy loves easy. Death becomes a symbol not of anything other than of itself. The guillotine destroys bodies because it can, because that is what it was built to do.
The Order: 1886 is a mess. There is a story running through it, but none of it adds up. First you are fighting werewolves, who may or may not be part of a rebellion but who seem to be your ancestral enemies. Then it turns out that the werewolves have an evil plan to take over America by infecting it with vampires. Or maybe the vampires have that plan and the werewolves are just in on it. It is hard to tell because by this point you are working with the rebels, who it turns out were not working with the werewolves, they just happened to be based in the same bit of London.
The East India Company is probably the first instance of what we might nowadays call a mega-corporation. In the true cyberpunk sense of the concept it owned land and bound governments to its will. In The Order:1886 it is the United India Company that has its eyes on Empire. The noble knights of The Order are oblivious. They would not have realised how mean and nasty the subjugation of the masses is if it were not revealed to be the plan of the vampires. The evil of people is nothing compared to the evil of a vampire. The British Empire fades into the past.
The Great Exhibition was sixty-three years before The Great War. In the Order: 1886 you crash an airship into an out-of-time and out-of-place Crystal Palace, still in Hyde Park. The building was originally moved in our world because the Great Exhibition was over which leads me to believe that, in the world of The Order the Exhibition continued: thirty-five years of futurism, of modernism and of belief in the indomitable nature of the human spirit. Maybe that explains the endless invention of the setting, an inventiveness that has spawned so many forms of dealing death but yet has still not seen the escalation to a global war.
Lafayette is, we must assume, a member of the French aristocracy, and one who lived through the revolution at that. At one point he charges Galahad to seek liberty above all other things. They are both members of a secretive order of artificially long-lived feudal warriors with implicit jurisdiction to execute civilians at will. I guess all of his relatives and friends who were guillotined during the terror are justified deaths for Lafayette. I guess that he only came to Britain because he wanted a change of scene, maybe to see the world. Either that or he forgot that he was part of a brutal regime that crushed liberty until it became the coal at the heart of the engine that eventually almost conquered Europe.
You killed a lot of rebels, even though your remit only really extends to werewolves, but you don’t really have very good werewolf-killing equipment or tactics and you have same really good rebel-killing stuff. Thankfully, the rebel leader fancies you so she’s willing to put aside all of the rebels you killed even though she doesn’t really need your help and you completely distrust her. Anyway, it turns out that the rebels aren’t really rebels as they are more interested in stopping the spread of the vampires to America than in actually overthrowing the tyranny they suffer under; that you represent. All through this you have a best friend who refuses to confide in you and a girlfriend who you refuse to confide in. Despite not trusting your best friend because he refuses to confide in you you get angry with your girlfriend for not trusting you and then confide in her brother instead, who is so clearly a villain he might as well have ‘villain’ written on his face in crayon and be showing you his new patented science-o-matic puppy-kicking machine.
The knights of The Order wear a strange combination of drab modern overcoats and bright 19th century military pomp. They carry fully automatic magazine fed firearms and have a tactical play-book based entirely on individual heroics. They regularly face enemies faster, stronger and more resilient than themselves, but they work on an ad-hoc team-basis, splitting up and shifting partners on a whim. Intra-team communication is limited to idle radio chatter rather than useful tactical information.
Clip-loaded infantry rifles appeared around 1888, taking the magazine concept already in place and adding fast reloading to the mix. The German Gewehr 1888 was a response to the French Lebel M1886, which coincidentally was the first infantry rifle to use smokeless ammunition. Before the Great War changed the way that people thought about war in the places that important people think about these things these weapons were mainly used in the colonies against people who’s opinions about the machinery of their death do not matter.
Steampunk cannot avoid Empire. It is defined by it. The best Steampunk acts as a way for those erased and obscured by imperial activity to tell their stories: this is the role taken on by Lakshmi. The worst Steampunk pretends that everything in the Victorian era was noble and just and an awful lot of fun: this is the role taken by Galahad. In The Order: 1886 you get to play as Galahad. Even as she tries to bring it back to the fore, Lakshmi’s story is overwritten once again by Galahad’s morality, by his desire to tame the exotic lands and to own the beautiful rebel princess.
A common fantasy trope is the endless inventiveness of the shorter-lived races. Dwarves and Elves remain in their fastnesses, unchanged by aeons while the world of men generates new horrors yearly. For every mechanical convenience contrived by the busy minds of human inventors hounded by their own mortality there is a general who will use it to ease his generation of death amongst his enemies. There is a mission in The Order: 1886 where Galahad is given a crossbow by Lucan, who remarks upon its silent properties. Galahad reminisces about the use of this older instrument of death. It is the only time he really opens up about his extended life, his distant past. It is a life measured by the weapons he uses to kill, to end prematurely the lives of those shorter than his anyway.
Your girlfriend who you’ve known for an undefined but clearly extensive part of your unnaturally extended life finally leaves in disgust because of how you repeatedly cold-shoulder her but that’s ok because this new hottie is beginning to open up, so you might as well do something you completely disagree with in a way that undermines your life’s work for no clear benefit other than saving the face of an old man because you know, standing moodily on top of buildings is a cool look these days. No-one acts like an actual human being the entire time.
The 1886 of The Order: 1886 is one in which greatcoat clad supermen dive from cover to cover, waging 20th century warfare in a world untouched by 20th century convenience. Arc guns send bolts of electrical death under the light of gas lamps. Thermite crackles and booms and incinerates flesh while the internal combustion engine remains a distant dream. Carefully machined parts exist only to slide cartridge after cartridge into rifled barrels. The machinery of death has been perfected but the world has not yet been shocked by its slaughter. The inevitability of Flanders fields lies, churned and muddy, in a future that it cannot see.
