The Second Great War
A Storyteller’s Playground
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
December 2023

Some years ago, I wrote and we published a series of books for Dungeons & Dragons, historical adventures featuring characters like Vlad the Impaler or settings like the pre-Christian Celts. I loved writing them, we won awards for them, and they were extraordinarily popular. I was sad when the license changed and we moved away from them.

The idea of games as storytelling devices stuck with me. Role-playing games are by their nature exercises in world-building. Wargames generally don’t do much of that, instead relying on the existing canon of historical works to provide their backdrop. That’s not really a satisfactory solution, since you as author/designer are then relying on others’ interpretations that probably don’t match your own. And, of course, there is no such existing backdrop when you make up the history.

We have our own made-up history, the Second Great War. It’s built around something that really happened: Woodrow Wilson’s attempt in late 1916 to bring the First World War (then known as the Great War) to a negotiated close. But all that came of the British request for mediation was a hardening of German attitudes, since some in the Kaiser’s government took that as a sign of weakness. If the British were ready to negotiate, then the war could be won on the battlefield with no need for compromise. The war continued, and the Germans lost their bet, instead suffering humiliating defeat (at the price of millions more lives and uncounted destruction).

In our alternative history, the Germans yield to Austrian pressure and open talks. By Christmas 1916, a bargain is sealed. No one gets everything they desired, but the war comes to a close. The great empires of Eastern Europe – Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey – survive for another generation. But war returns in 1940, as the revisionist powers – Russia, France, and Italy – seek to overturn Wilson’s Peace.

We’ve been telling that story through a whole series of expansions for Second World War at Sea games: The Cruel Sea, Tropical Storm, Sword of the Sea and still more. It’s a very different world than that of our own history, because I didn’t want our alternative-history games to be just like the historical ones, but with different-colored pieces. In the world of the Second Great War, the airship dominates the skies and the battleship dominates the seas.

All of that makes for a very different world, in terms of technology, politics and economics. And while we can touch on that in the games and expansion sets, there’s only so much space we can devote to the background story. I used all of them, but wanted to expand the world-building aspect to a deeper level.

The expansion books tell the story of the campaigns and battles through their scenarios, just like the historical games. That gives at least some framework for the broader war, but doesn’t put any of the individual naval campaigns in their context. I wanted to do that, and so I wrote a book about the Second Great War, called The Second Great War.

It’s simply a book of the history of the Second Great War: the participants, the stakes for which they fought, their war-making potential and armed forces. And once we’ve set up the background, the book delves into the first year and a half of this world-wide conflict. And it is a world-wide conflict, bring in the Persian Gulf/Red Sea, South America and even the Caspian Sea, waters that did not see much if any conflict during the real Second World War.

What it doesn’t do, because that’s not its job, is get into the nuts and bolts of the ships of the Second Great War at Sea. And that’s what the naval game fans (or at least, a hefty slice of them) want to see.

The fleets of the Second Great War are very large; it’s a more prosperous war, thanks to the early end of the First Great War without reparations. That makes the Great Depression much less great, and though this world has a naval limitations treaty, it encourages retaining older warships and rebuilding them, while setting much less stringent limits on new warships than did our own history’s Washington Five-Power Treaty.

The fleets of the Second Great War include many of the ships already found in Second World War at Sea; most of the story is told through expansions rather than new games, so it makes sense to use at least some of the pieces. There are far fewer aircraft carriers in the Second Great War setting, and the fixed-wing aircraft aren’t nearly as capable as those of our own history.

We talk about those fleets and their ships in the Fleets of the Second Great War books.

Fleets: La Royale is all about the French Navy, including both ships that actually existed and fought in the Second World War, and those that only exist in the realm of the Second Great War. Most of these were ships planned by the Marine Nationale, which had rather grandiose plans to construct a mighty battle fleet, but not actually laid down thanks to a shortage of funds or abundance of sanity. Older ships appear as well, modernized for a new generation’s war. And a few that are artifacts only of this alternative history.

Fleets: Imperial Germany, like the title says, tells us all about the Imperial German Navy’s warships (and its airships, too). Since Imperial Germany came to an end in November 1918, the fleet isn’t the same as the one fielded by the Nazi regime. For one thing, the Nazi regime was – like most authoritarian movements – headed by idiots. The grandiose warships planned for the Nazi Plan Z could have been built (and they are, in our Plan Z expansion set), but they were not very practical.

The German fleet includes the more recent ships of the old High Seas Fleet, modernized for a new war, some ships planned by Imperial Germany but never built, also modernized, and completely new designs that might be similar to a few of the Plan Z ships but are cast in the same pattern as Imperial Germany’s ships. They emphasize protection over armament, and are designed on tried, conservative principles. Nazism, consciously rejecting the old ways, pressed naval architects to employ untried technologies and methods.

Fleets: Imperial Russia follows a similar pattern. The Empire collapsed in the spring of 1917, leaving behind very few useful warships but a thick sheaf of impractical plans for new ones. The Imperial Navy of our warped history gets modernized versions of those leftovers, and new ships based as closely as possible on Soviet design practice (which was, to a great extent, imported from Italy).

None of these books are strictly necessary to play the games, but that’s not the point. These books are the glue bringing the different expansions and games together into one coherent story line. And that’s what’s fun about playing alternate history – you get to write the next chapter.

You can order La Royale right here.

You can order Fleets: Imperial Germany right here.

You can order Imperial Russia right here.

Make fake news fun again! Order The Second Great War right here.

Storyteller’s Bookshelf
            The Second Great War
            Fleets: Imperial Germany
            Fleets: Imperial Russia
            Fleets: La Royale
Retail Price: $119.96
Package Price: $110.00
You can order the Storyteller’s Bookshelf right here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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