>>5356515Crucible-era Russia:
Crucified Geography:
As a place in terms of Geography, Russia would be considered a nation with the worst luck for a civilization to live in in terms of strategic security. Encompassing the northern half of the Great Eurasian continent, Russia inherited a vast plain that stretches half the globe with vast mountains and deserts to the south and a merciless tundra to the north and sandwiched between these two inhospitable biomes in the shape of a wedge are the Eurasian steppes, where it's not too hot to die of thirst yet not too cold to freeze your nose off. This is combined with the fact that Russia is a country with very little geographic barriers to protect them leaving the place as a whole insecure.
The Crucible changed little of that and simultaneously a lot of that geography.
To the South, the Desert sands remained more or less the same, and the Rocky mountain ranges replaced with classic Calcite formations replete with exotic minerals decorating the surface ridges. Yet that pristine wilderness is infested with the writhing megafauna hordes of the Desert Sand worms where the Mongol worm riders make their rounds on the southern edge of the steppes traveling east and west and plying their trade. In the heart of the steppes, herds of screaming Goats and tick-bloated antelopes roam the plains, shedding their plague infested parasites wherever they roam. To the north lie the Eternal Tundra and Frozen Taiga of what was once known as Siberia. The Subzero temperatures of the arctic starve the Cord of pliable biomass on the surface, yet simultaneously providing the Crucible of the most fertile and biomass rich biome deep underground in the permafrost. Here a pocket of the encroaching cancer of No-Man's land lies in the Arctic, isolated from the main tumor as a metastasized yet paradoxically benign outgrowth, its influence converting the dead to rise again and again to assault the Slavic Bastion of Moscow, a particular specially amalgam of note is the Behemoth class Dracolich of the Ural oil fields.
Crucified History:
With little geographic barriers to protect the country from invaders and a history replete with their nation getting bent over the barrel and run roughshod by invaders (mongols) and their very own government implementing terrible policies that culled their population to a terminal stage (Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and Modern Russia), a great majority of the people of the Rus live a hard life, especially the women.
The Crucible's advent did them no favors. To them the Crucible was just another problem that added to their daily woes. The only silver lining to this was that now none of them had to worry about getting beaten black and blue by their vodka-chugging husbands and/or boyfriends. No more gang rapes, no more blackmail, no more domestic abuse, no more drug dealers, no more human traffickers.
And then the Warlords began to take power.
