Also, do we want to encourage use of our "official" voice/text chat channel on Discord?
Chat is too hectic for me though. I have proudly left my Skype age behind me and never intend to go back seeing what it did to my productivity at critical times.
But what I wanted to propose here is some unified backstory. For RP incitement, we need a reason why suddenly trans-newtonian stuff exists. Playing as Russia just got me an idea for this though: The big bang of Tunguska in 1908. You can read it up on Wiki for interesting details, but essentially there was some huge explosion in russian tundra at that time, and way before nuclear weaponry, that most likely was caused by a quite large meteor hitting earth. The impact was so intense that the shockwave flew around the planet multiple times, and the atmosphere got charged up so that people on the other side of the globe were able to read newspaper at night for the next days to come.
Thing about this though, even until today: We have not found a definite crater, even though there are some suspicions about certain seas.(might be really deeply buried)
...In other words, a perfect opportunity for a hidden ancient spaceship crash.
We need no details about who or what exactly crashed there for now. Just that Russia finally dug up the ship, analyzed it, and became aware to what TN resources are, and how to find them, and potentially utilize them. Intelligence of the world got wind of it, so American and etc. Agents were taking looks at the crash as well.(or maybe there were defectors or other things even ->-> Team 2 can say what they would want. The story shouldn't be completely Russia booked anyway)
Of course this premise (with the tech-"steal"/migration) places initial well founded qualms between the powers, but since we are in cold war anyway... .
Another advantage for me personally: You might not know, but "Vandermeer" is actually just a book character from a german author who wrote exactly about that big Tunguska explosion. Vandermeer was a german reporter with very interesting personality who investigated this as something similar happened a second time in that region about 90 years later.(wasn't aliens though, was "god"
)
That means I can sluice in my forum name into this situation, and have it make kind of sense.
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Also, we need a topic in which both teams can just talk. Especially now where setting needs to be agreed upon.