Fictitious African State - Unnamed Mercenaries

Kitbashed from Warlord Games Project Z survivors (make and female) and random crap from my bits box. This dastardly trio will be elite level and hard to kill, being tooled up to sin and assist l also armoured with an insane amount of confidence and chutzpah!

Fictitious African State

 I’ve been gaming historicals now for about 15 years although always stayed firmly in the “it happened a while ago so its far enough away not to feel too weird” camp. I know that’s not quite true as there are people still alive that lived through WW2 however most of the footage and pictures of that period are black and white which makes it feel “old”. However, in the main I’ve stayed away from anything that could be seen to glamorize or trivialize events that people are still struggling to deal with today.

When Osprey released Black Ops I was drawn into the potential of gaming fictional spy and action movies and video games, after all the cover does appear to feature Solid Snake! This post won’t be a review of Black Ops as that’s been covered by other, more competent bloggers than me out there, but this will be an introduction to the fictional setting for my foray in
to very near future/modern gaming!

So let me introduce the fictional African state of Zaka Neba, which roughly translates to Home of the People in the local language of Mooré (a real language spoken by the Mossi peoples of Western Africa).

This is a post-colonial western African nation sandwiched somewhere between Mali to the north, Nigeria to the east and Senegal to the west. Through negotiation and peaceful revolution, it emerged from its colonial past to become a democracy competing favourably with its neighbours in the wider African geopolitical community. Its people are ethnically and religiously diverse and currently enjoying a growing economy and improved quality of life equivalent to many prosperous African nations (although this is mainly in the cities). Rurally things still echo both the colonial period of rich european landowners as well as isolated tribal communities following traditional cultural practices.

However things recently got weird with the accidental discovery of a naturally occurring mineral compound that has the unusual property of being 20 times more effective at capturing carbon than any known industrial process. The team that discovered this were a joint initiative by the Zaka Neba government research institute and 3 leading western universities, and as you can expect the news  of this discovery made its way to several western governments who instantly prioritised the exclusive acquisition of this compound over their competitors.

What followed was aggressive negotiations by the west with the Zaka Neba government over who would have exclusive access to this potentially immeasurably valuable resource, however behind the scenes this would be decided through the age-old solution of take what you can by force!

The key players in this imaginary drama are:

• The Zaka Neba Ministry of Development – government officials and hired mercenary specialist “operators”
• US Marines and Delta Force – ostensibly a peacekeeping
• force, but may have CIA involvement
• Western Operators – unknown Spec Ops, possibly of various nations or private interests
• The Rural Peace Initiative – Local militia operating as police in rural areas
• Agents – Unknown who they represent, pose as civilians.