Welcome.
You are a Franciscan monk. You are being sent by your local abbey to a monastery in Normandy to participate in an overnight skydiving competition in which the Catholic Church will try to land as many monks on behind the beaches as they can in preparation for the Jesuits and the Benedictines hitting the beaches the following morning.
The idea is to uproot and dislodge the evil Hugenots from their perch controlling the beaches of Normandy and to drive them inland to the town of Carentan where you hope they will surrender and seek the mercy of the Lord. Because you intend to show them none.
You are given two mission options. Do you drop in with the [[pathfinders]] and prep the drop zone for the main skydiving team or do you drop in with the [[main unit]] and prep the whole area for the seaborne invasion?
The future lies in your hands. Pick wisely.You chose to drop with the pathfinders.
You drop in with a small band of pathfinders quite far inland behind enemy lines and almost immediately you are hit with petitions for your surrender and a call to prayer to get close to the Hugenots' personal relationship with God.
You see through this heresy and press on with your mission. You must prep the drop zone for the main force when they come in in the early morning in order to prep all of Normandy for the seaborne invasion later in the following day.
You need to seek a [[nice open field]] so you can set up the equipment. Or would you like to engage in [[prayer combat]] with some Hugenots first, to make sure the drop zone will not be intercessed upon by pathetic Protestant prayer weapons? Maybe you choose to [[intercede]] on behalf of the Hugenots and perhaps save a few of them as well?You chose to drop with the main force.
The pathfinders went in hours ahead of your drop unit and you guys drop in and secure a few bridges. You also manage to get the seaborne invaders some purchased time by blowing up a prayer cannon emplacement but you lose a few monks in the process.
In a few hours the greatest oceanic invasion in the current history of humanity is about to take place. It will only be the third invasion launched from England into France in the past 100 years, and the second invasion involving Normandy in the past millennium. The last time an invasion involved Normandy the staging area was on this beach. Now the staging area is in England and the invasion will be headed in the opposite direction!
Maybe you should engage in some [[prayer combat]] right now. If not, you should start [[clearing the beaches from behind]] the Hugenot pillboxes!You find a nice open field to set up your equipment on. You help the main drop unit fall into their places and the Over Lord Operation is about to commence!
Start [[clearing the beaches from behind]] or engage the Hugenots in pitched [[prayer combat]] right now!You duel with the Hugenots in prayer combat. You lose the fight.
Hit the reload button to try a different path.You choose to intercede for the Hugenots. God seems to be taking a piss because nothing is happening.
You decide maybe you could try [[prayer combat]] or find that stupid [[nice open field]] instead of wasting your time saying prayers that the old bastard in the sky isn't privvy to listening to anyways.You and your combined alms team clear the beaches of Normandy from behind the Hugenot pillboxes. You force a number of them to surrender without a fight and the rest convert to Catholicism to save their souls for a future in the true Most High Heaven.
The dudes who surrendered but didn't convert will now know the pains of a visit to purgatory.
Now it's time to push the remaining Hugenots who were retreating anyways, to [[Carentan]] and to utterly crush the resistance from the Hugenots!You arrive at Carentan.
Your unit is immediately hit with suppressive automatic small arms fire.
Do you [[order your fellow monks into the roadside trenches for cover]] or would you rather [[call in an airstrike from some metal angels]] to try to soften up the town's resistance?This does very little.
You are now pinned and unable to continue. Your fellow monks are picked off one by one by intercessory prayer snipers situated in the surrounded hedgerows.
Try a different tack. Start over.The metal angels fly in but are shot down by the AA guns inside the town itself.
Still, they manage to destroy the rooftop autogunner who is now on his way to Perdition for an eternity of infernal torment!
Try to push into Carentan itself to [[neutralize the AA gun]]. You may need to fight urban combat. It will be bloody.You push deep within the town of Carentan and manage to flank and fix fire on the AA gun, but its armor is too thick and deflects your aggressive prayers far too easily. You need to use [[more potent prayers]] to hit it or you need to try to [[convert the gunners]] to Catholicism to get them to stop shooting you and your metal angels.You order your monks to flank the gun a bit more and you try using more potent prayers to knock it out. You aren't successful. The gunners end up dying anyway, but not because of the more potent prayers. It turns out they were Universalists and the retreating Hugenots shot their Universalist allies in the back as they were leaving, because the Hugenots didn't really trust this hellhole band of Arianists.
Your monks are now ordered by High Command to [[continue inland]].
You walk out from your unit to try to convince the gunners that they need to convert to Catholicism to save their souls in the only true version of Christianity there is known to the stars.
It turns out these gunners aren't Hugenots but Universalists. You decide to renege on your offer and you use their currently exposed situation to pelt them to Perdition with aggressive prayers, but not the more potent kind. Now you can [[continue inland]].
You keep going until you reach the Siegfried Line.
However, once you reach Bastogne, a pocket of Unitarians come rushing out to surround your monks and this becomes a historical battle we now know as the Battle of the Bulge.
The other reason this battle is known as this is because the High Commander of Forward Calvary is on site when the salient is formed, and he happens to be quite obese, hence the name.
[[Fight your way out]] or die trying. [[Call for aid drops]] by the McNasty 13 or die of thirst and starvation.You and your monks fight your way out of the salient. It is successful, but you lose most of your battalion in the process. As a result, you are demoted, sacked, and sent back to your original abbey. Later, they send you to a small [[diocese]] in Texas to serve in your retirement.
However, you still want to see action. The combat ain't over yet and you aren't going to let some small defeat stop you from your heavenly glories!McNasty's Filthy 13 drop in and immediately call in aid drops for you and your fellow monks. They help you to stave off hunger and thirst for the rest of the winter months. When the warm muddy spring arrives you and your monks stay occulted in the trenches and the foxholes while the Unitarians get stuck in the mud literally and your prayer cannons bomb them to high heaven. Well, actually those evil Arianists go to Hell.
Push through the [[Hurtgen Forest]] and reach the Siegfried Line!This battle will later come to be known as the Hurt Factory because the fight for Hurtgen Forest is so bloody literally afterward bodies are strewn from the pillboxes at the entrance to the forest all the way through the smashed dragons teeth that lie on the French side of the [[Siegfried Line]], the other side of which is Germany!You create enough trouble at your local diocese that a bunch of recent sunday school graduates decide to enlist in the Monk Battalion and join you in a secret, unsanctioned voyage across the sky ocean to [[Hurtgen Forest]] to participate in a bloody battle to reach the Siegfried Line!You and your glorious, victorious Allied Catholic Forces cross the Siegfried Line only to learn that the Russian Orthodox Forces have captured Berlin and burned the Evil Emperor at the stake.
You also learn that the Evil Empire had engaged in some rather unsavory practices against your friends, the Jews.
But now the war is over in the West. A war rages on in the Pacific but that's none of your business in a few months' time as a Holy Hand Grenade or two are detonated in the land of the Rising Sun and they too capitulate to the glory of heaven.
Now it's time to [[settle down and return to that forsaken diocese]] to go back to your retirement. Or, if you were never assigned to that forsaken diocese, to retire peacefully.You return to your sleepy little diocese in Texas and are celebrated as a hero.
Would you like to retry [[Brothers in Alms]] using a different path this time around???