Great Swamp War

The Great Swamp Wars were a series of long-term conflicts that centrally defined the history of the Ralgon nation until the 1680's AN, when it expanded off its home island of Drag'os. The problems of the island's interior thus continued to play a less dramatic role in Ralgonese military history through its later history, and during its harrowing transformation into the Imperial Federation in the first decade of the 1700's AN. The conflicts revolving around the Great Swamp and neighboring Dragosian Badlands would take varying degrees of importance in the following decades, as the inherent problem of insectoid and dragonid megafauna waxed and waned, often to an extreme degree. The defining war was simply called "The Great Swamp War" due to its singular scope and time scale until the mid-1730's AN. In reality, there were at least three such major conflicts specifically regarding this region between 1655 AN and 1740 AN.

The historiography changes c1735 AN, when the conflict suddenly arose to prominence as the Imperial Federation neared the end of a nearly four-decade reprieve from the worst of these problems, allowing it to expand far into the oceans of Micras. Ironically, the expansion and mass colonization of densely inhabited far from Drag'os caused the Ralgonese populations on Cibola and Keltia to explode over this time,

The First Great Swamp War

The first so-called "War" was neither a single conflict, nor was it fought between nations. Instead, it was a conflict fought between the peoples inhabiting the island of Drag'os and the megafauna of various sorts that inhabited the Badlands, which were divided into eastern and western halves by the Great Divide (itself a series of mountain ranges that divided the island in two). The War may be divided into four phases marked by significant events: The Dark Ages, The Atomic Bombardment of 1450, the beginning of reliably recorded events c1655 AN, and the Atomic Bombardment of 1672 AN. The Western Campaign of 1680 AN marked the end of the First Great Swamp War.

The final western campaign briefly saw the entirety of Drag'os subdued by the Holy Ralgon Empire in that year, marking the end of the First Great Swamp War in Ralgonese historiography. This proved to be brief, as the Holy Ralgon Empire, despite its military might, experienced a near-collapse five years later due to the military and economic strain of its endless high-intensity wars, also piled on during the Crisis of 1685 and is attempts at holding onto its far-flung colonial empire -- most of which was lost before it even started due to its sudden fall from grace.

The Second Great Swamp War

Ralgonese historians place the so-called Second Great Swamp War between 1685 AN and the nascent Imperial Federation as it proceeded through the reconquest of Drag'os in the Ralgonese War of Succession in the early 1700's AN. Rather than a true war, however, the bulk of active armed conflict was fought against rebel cells lodging well beyond Imperial Federation garrisons in the deep interiors, in the very few places where both the dragons and giant insects of the Great Swamp and Dragosian Badlands were apt to avoid for whatever reason. These defensible holdouts would last for decades, and the rebels and megafauna alike were never aggressively addressed until past 1735 AN, when both were beginning to grow in numbers, becoming more than a passing nuisance to Imperial forces.

Unlike the First Great Swamp War, the closing phases of the Second saw very little grand-scale battles that were so characteristic of the pre-1685 Ralgonese military. Instead, the problem was contained by way of mass encirclement of both regions at the same time, with these massive areas instead passively used to train army contingents and give them some form of battle experience before being shipped off to fight in various Wars of the Dispossessed, seeing additional combat in Haifa and other far-flunt theaters. For most of the 1720's, duty in the Drag'osian interior was a routine experiencce for the vast majority of soldiers.

For the most part, the Ralgonese War of Succession was well and truly over by the Conquest of Valora in 1715 AN. And the developed and/or permanently inhabited areas of Drag'os were near-entirely cleared of organized resistance past 1720 AN. However, the deep interior still retained holdouts and remained a thorn to central government planners for years. Ultimately, it ended up such that the Imperial government's policy of containment meant that it never managed to sustainably pacify the dragon problem or, far worse, the giant insect problem in the deep interiors of the swamp. Eventually, the gigantic insects (especially the winged ones) either burrowed or traveled over the uninhabited, deep interior of the Great Divide and other mountain ranges in the west and descended on the Badland's more lush (and incredibly remote) valleys, allowing the insects to directly invade dragon territory in the Badlands to the northwest sometime past 1730 AN. This migration near-immediately triggered violence between the two hyper-aggressive sets of creatures. Simply put, the rebellious holdouts never needed to be dealt with directly, as said rebels had bigger things to worry about than random Imperial patrols.

It was thus that the Second Great Swamp War went almost unrecorded in the midst of other concerns of grand strategy pursued by the Imperial Government, except as a footnote in the historical annals of the day. And in the shadow of the Imperial Federation's great expansions into virgin territory on the far side of the world, the same problems that triggered the first Great Swamp War were snuffed out in the second, not with a great crusade, but as an accidental consequence of suppressing a different problem entirely.

Thus it was that in the 1720's and the early 1730's, the mutually destructive forces within the Drag'osian deep interior allowed the government of Emperor Anarion to focus resources on far-off regions such as Haifa, where the Confederacy of the Dispossessed had been making headway on the frontiers, and the Imeprial Federation struggled to realize territorial and population gains through various combinations of economics, force, and diplomacy. Meanwhile on the waterways of Haifa and the Great Western Ocean, the farthest and least defended shipping lanes in the region were already reduced in their capacity after the effective collapse of the Raspur Pact and Keltia Command's unity during the Shireroth-Benacian Union War. The resulting lapse in reliable friends up the strait strained Imperial forces, diverting resources from areas perceived as less critical to the wider empire's security.