New chapter and more Lore!! · 2:30pm March 15th
With the new chapter, I feel like it's time a certain faction finally gets it's due. As story wise, they will be expanded upon bit by bit with the joining of a new companion. ( Big yay!) Unfortuantly I don't have any plans to make any story involving the Barabry Islands, it's more of a free for anyone to use setting and faction. But the general idea is that the Barbary islands were directly between Equestra and Zebraca, in the Celestia ocean, and unless you went the long way around through the Luna ocean, you had to deal with the Barbary Pirates. (Whom the Zebras had just gave a shit tone of gold and guns too) so early war, the Islands were effectively a major proxy war, where a lot of the worst fighting were happening, all wile the ponies and Zebras practiced and more "honorable" war... until the Littlehoof massacre happened, then shit got real nasty real fast.
Due to the pirates presence, It would make it hard for any direct navel support through the Celestia ocean very difficult without going through other nations waters. Which contributed the war being drawn out for so long, as both nations couldn't simply duke it out without spending tones of resources and signing a shit ton of political agreements. This at first went in the Zebras favor, but after their first assault on Equestra was pushed back, and now the ponies were paying off the pirates, it became a massive stalemate.
How to describe the post war Barbary Islands... how about you take the Equestia Wasteland, but on a tone of crack and booze! not all the islands are a hellscape, and the locals have ways to make safe zones, but you got to be a certain kind of crazy to love living there. Many of the pirate familys still have a presence there, but it's often through branch family's whose hole job it to sit where they are so that no other family can come and claim their irradiated hunk of ancestral land. Because they are crazy spiteful like that. And several of their major city's had been "restored" such as the city of Old Royal, a port city that had been practically destroyed and rebuilt nearly every hundred years, yet the Barbary ponies keep coming back to it.
As a setting, it be a thick chain of islands, where it's hard to tell if the locals of one island are friendly, cannibals, or ghosts until you get too close to turn back. Oh, there is treasure to be found, but it's probably cursed, and you're probably going to have to fight to keep it. But hay, It's pirates, so drink your rum, raise the flag, and have an adventure. (Just ignore your dead crewmates, they don't need to know their dead if they're still sailing with ya.)
Nice work as always. Also more lore!