[Webstral]

Tombot, in effect you’ve just asked the guy at the end of the bar to tell you his story. I suppose the good news is that no one actually has to read along.

Manifest Destiny is a big picture idea. For the purposes of all my work, I ignore the drought in Howling Wilderness. Essentially, Colorado Springs concludes that the country has reached a crossroads. The food situation has more-or-less stabilized, though obviously the availability of food is neither uniform nor as great as the redevelopment of the economy demands. Concurrently with the stabilization of the food supply is the overall completion of consolidation process in which the survivors band together in defensible cantonments based on the center of the old municipalities or, in the case of large cities, in distinct defensible areas. Small marauder bands (less than 100 members) find themselves unable to tackle cantonments with well-organized defenses. As a result, many of the surviving marauders have started banding together into new super-groups called hordes.

Hordes change the picture dramatically. Whereas large and successful marauder bands sometimes turned warlord in the past, hordes tend to be too large to assume control over a community. They take a cantonment by sheer weight of numbers and ferocity and consume everything inside. It doesn’t take a senior MI officer to see where that leads.

The crisis with New America underscores another difficulty: warlords consolidating power. Although hordes pose a more immediate danger, the long-term hazards of warlords setting up shop permanently are very considerable. Warlords who gain control over large populations with good resource bases might be able to challenge Milgov (or Civgov, who is the least of evils from Milgov’s point of view) down the road. This, if course, is why a special operations team was sent to bring in Carl Hughes.

In a nutshell, Manifest Destiny is Milgov’s counteroffensive against chaos while at least some of the pre-Exchange knowledge base and skills survive. Manifest Destiny is based on a simple idea: reestablishing the connections between the surviving Milgov cantonments. Once a measure of the interdependence that characterizes industrialized society can be restored, Milgov will be in a position to restore the country. This is not much different than CivGov’s plan or even Milgov’s concept in 2000. The big difference in 2001 is that Milgov has airships, plus the industrial and knowledge base to build more. While a small fleet of small airships (which is what Milgov will be constructing in 2001) isn’t useful for transporting bulk goods, skilled personnel and high-value parts can be transported great distances in much greater safety than on the ground. Cue the PCs.

In the big picture sense, Milgov’s ability to consolidate or dispatch people with special skills means that critical bottlenecks. One idea under the Manifest Destiny umbrella is for characters to be in a first-generation Milgov airship that crashes en route to the Milgov enclave in southern Illinois. Aside from the PCs, the cargo would be parts and technical expertise to repair the refinery at Cairo, IL. The PCs are along because the airship is making another stop before returning to Colorado Springs, and the PCs are bound for the second stop. Once the crash happens, though, they have to take on the mission of getting the parts and personnel to Cairo. I haven’t developed this idea very much, but it gives the PCs the chance to explore some new ground in the Midwest.