Exordium is a peer-reviewed alternate history timeline and open source mod for Victoria 3. The timeline begins with numerous independent points of divergences in the 1800s and ends with the start of the mod in 2020, which, in turn, ends around 2040.
There does not exist one singular point of the world of Exordium that completely de-entwines its world from that of real life. One can potentially point to the failure of the coup d’etat of the Empire of Brazil, the election of William Jennings Bryan as President of the United States, or the death of Ioseb Jughashvili during a bank robbery in 1907 as potential indicators of core differences that has lead the world to its becoming. From a myriad of independent points of divergences, Exordium aims to be interesting and divergent in every nation and aspect of its alternate history. Said aspects do not include just geopolitics and economics but the history of the experimental sciences, of popular music, of cinematography, of spiritual religion, and of every other facet of human identity.
From a broader, internationalist perspective, the world of Exordium has achieved a tri-polar order, one that is generally wealthier and more developed than that of OTL but simultaneously more politically radical and passionate in traditions and culture. The differences in the interwar period lead to the Second World War’s Pacific Theater ending with the victory of the Japanese Empire in 1947 despite the destruction of Nazi Germany by 1946. The Cold War was fought between the three blocs of a corporatist Co-Prosperity Sphere, a liberal Entente, and a multi-tendency USSR which dueled in various proxy wars, from France to Syria, from Korea to Zaire and Guatemala. By 1993, reformists took power in all three superpowers, enabling the Cold War to end in detente- as without peace, all other dreams vanish and are reduced to ashes. Yet beneath this era of co-existence and prosperity has the motivations and aspirations of its rulers and elites been blurred with atrocities and masonic conspiracies. The world of 2020 is cleaner, more inclusive, and more equal than that of OTL, but it still longs to awaken, having never lost its potential to unravel and fall into disarray as it rises to the stars.
The Victoria 3 mod is currently a work in progress, although work is actively being made on its wiki
and timeline. Its community can be found here, on Discord.
Exordium contains examples of:
- Alternate History: Every single country in the world starts out in a different situation than of OTL- with nearly every nation having a different flag, territory and/or name than it has in OTL 2020.
- Balkanize Me: Occurs to Myanmar after the end of the Cold War, where international isolation and decades of mismangement leads to full-scale collapse and it being reduced to over 8 successor states.
- Chummy Commies: Although the United States is still chiefly anti-communist, due to the primary enemy in the Cold War being the Empire of Japan, relations with the USSR, which in this timeline never fell into Stalinism, is much less tense than OTL.
- In Spite of a Nail: Despite the several divergences Exordium has from our timeline (with some going all the way back to the 19th century), many people, movements and media still exists in their universe in similar forms to those of our own.
- Invoked deliberately for most situations, as Exordium eschews drastically changing characters from their OTL selves in favor of more faithful depictions, albeit with different outcomes from OTL. Justified by the notion that the personalities of real-life historical figures are usually intriguing enough to explore being put in different situations without distorting what they believed in.
