MUME
I'm jumping into this and it's very cool; thanks for the suggestion! I think the very-clear shared lore makes it so that it's not a huge amount of work to get into it (for me anyway), and that consistency means you're not going to have the weird issue that some of these seem to of clashing archetypes and themes (e.g. a telekinetic alien, a brooding goth gunslinger, and a magical rainbow pony walk into a bar).
That said, I do think the shared lore may restrict freedom a bit (I don't know how plausible it would be to work towards making the events of the third age impossible...like leading a peasant revolt in Gondor or something).
This is such awful history; of course it works because it serves the US, but it does blow me away that otherwise well-meaning people continue to parrot it. You don’t have to be a “tankie” to stop spouting this nonsense.
You’re referring to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. That was a non-aggression treaty, not an “alliance.” The soviets would be pretty foolish to make an alliance with a country whose fascist genocidal leader, hitler, made clear the inescapable need to invade the soviet union in mein kampf.
You know who else had already made non-aggression pacts with the Nazis before that? The UK, France, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Estonia, and Latvia. You think they were “allied” with the Nazis?
Hell the Spanish civil war was a proxy war that the soviets had to pull out of to get ready for invasion (much to the ire of western anarchists forever).
No, man. The soviet position was pretty damned clear: they needed time to mobilize. You think they were mobilizing to deal with…what, Poland? Everyone knew what was happening between the Nazis and the soviets. They still weren’t ready, and got slaughtered.
Dislike the Soviet Union for other reasons. There are plenty of good ones. This is nonsense.